<p>Sitemaps are very basic structured files that tell Search Engines, crawlers, and aggregators what web addresses your website has to offer.</p><p>While RSS feeds are similar in the sense that it also lists what things from your website, they are mostly used for published blog posts.</p><h3>What are Sitemaps?</h3><p>A website can have many links and subdirectories. For example, baalish.com has a unique subdirectory for users' profiles: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://baalish.com/u/">https://baalish.com/u/</a></p><p>Anything after the "/u/" will be treated as a username. Since Search Engines don't have a way of knowing which web addresses your website might have, we generally use a sitemap to tell it where it can "crawl".</p><p></p><h3>What are RSS-Feeds?</h3><p>RSS feeds are a simple and standard way of listing mainly blogs a website might have to offer. By implementing RSS feeds, a website can effectively let other websites or aggregators who gather together all the blogs from different websites of publications know which blogs your website has.</p><p>This can not only attract more viewers but even be helpful for SEO. Google News also uses RSS feeds to show its news listing. This generates a lot of clicks for any blog post.</p><p></p><h3>How baalish uses RSS and Sitemaps?</h3><p>baalish.com keeps the importance of RSS and Sitemaps in mind when its users publish new blog posts. The RSS feeds are regularly updated. As such, posts that are approved by the moderators will be shown not only on the homepage but also on sites like Google News and others where RSS feeds are used.</p><p>Here's what an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://baalish.com/rss.xml">RSS feed for baalish.com</a> looks like:</p><img class="PostContentImage" src="https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/baalish-pub.appspot.com/o/post-files%2FspwvVKIoyHS4V6q8nGgv9yb0trZ2%2Fy3kuvVVcWSyb31npc0W6%2F85834738-39d0-43d2-b59a-645128a045da.png?alt=media&amp;token=dccf35ee-9b71-445a-b822-1dccbacf81b2"><p>This might seem gibberish, but it lists all the recent posts published on baalish's homepage.</p><p><br>And using the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbaalish.com%2Frss.xml">RSS validation tool by W3C</a> we can see that it works just as intended:</p><img class="PostContentImage" src="https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/baalish-pub.appspot.com/o/post-files%2FspwvVKIoyHS4V6q8nGgv9yb0trZ2%2Fy3kuvVVcWSyb31npc0W6%2F27435879-66ed-4001-a4d6-0115c10f6e9d.png?alt=media&amp;token=aa653ab4-38a6-4fd1-a17a-3387ceb69d4a"><p>This way baalish ensures that posts published will gain more exposure and more users can enjoy the blogs and stories published here.</p>

Sitemaps are very basic structured files that tell Search Engines, crawlers, and aggregators what web addresses your website has t...

Aneek Rahman

Deep dive: How auto-generated Sitemaps and RSS feed improve SEO for blogs on baalish