Even if there is no guarantee that Google and other search engines’ indexing will be optimized due to XML sitemaps being used, the structured link directories increase the chance of this being the case. The crawler-friendly table of contents can also pay off, especially for sites with dynamic content that are subject to constant change. The same applies to larger web projects that have many subpages but not a big backlink structure (yet). Sites like these tend to be checked too irregularly for changes to be noticed or aren’t even picked up by the search engines’ radars. Thanks to sitemap.xmp, you can help them get noticed by indexing bots more quickly.
An additional advantage: as well as listing URLs of subpages, XML sitemaps can also list media files such as videos or images. For these, there are even extra tags that tell the crawler what content type is being used (e.g. <image>, <video>). In addition, attributes can be used that describe the content in more detail or specify the duration, so that search engines can optimally identify it. There is also a special version of the XML sitemap for news portals, which promises articles will be optimally indexed thanks to specific attributes such as genre, publication date, or title.