A sitemap is your current content register
An XML sitemap collects the canonical URLs you want indexed. Keep it clean, provide a credible last modification date and include each language version separately.
A sitemap is a discovery and control signal. It does not guarantee that a page will be indexed or receive a particular position.
- Canonical, public URLs only
- A genuine lastmod after a substantive change
- Both Dutch and English pages
- No privacy, test or API routes
IndexNow reports only what changed
IndexNow tells participating search engines that a URL was added, changed or removed. A verification key lives on your domain and you submit only the relevant URLs.
According to the official documentation, an HTTP 200 only confirms that the URL was received. It does not prove that a search engine will crawl, index or rank the page higher.
Use it as a publishing signal, not a ranking hack. Content, internal context and technical quality still determine whether the page has value.
Turn publishing into a fixed chain
A clean release updates the page, canonicals, hreflang, sitemap and structured data together. You can then signal the changed URL and check its crawl status.
This makes discoverability part of delivery instead of a separate repair round after launch.
Primary sources
The factual and technical claims in this article were checked against these sources.
