Help center sitemap

A sitemap is the list of pages on your site that you want search engines to know about. Ochre generates one for you automatically. You enable it once and submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

What's in the sitemap

The sitemap includes every article that meets all of these conditions:

• Status is published.
• Help center audience is public (not gated).
• Article meta robots is index, follow (or any indexable variant).

Articles in draft, archived, or noindex status are excluded. Categories and the help center home page are also included by default.

The sitemap updates within minutes when you publish, archive, or change status. There is no manual rebuild step.

Enabling the sitemap

Knowledge → Settings → SEO → Enable sitemap. Toggle on. Save.

The sitemap publishes at:

• https://help.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml if you have a custom domain.
• https://<workspace-slug>.ochrehq.com/sitemap.xml otherwise.

Submitting to Google

1. Open Google Search Console.
2. Add the help center as a property if you have not already (the verification flow uses a DNS TXT record or HTML file; both work).
3. Go to Sitemaps.
4. Paste the sitemap URL and submit.

Google reads the sitemap within a few hours and starts crawling. Indexing usually takes 1 to 4 weeks for new content.

Submitting to Bing

1. Open Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. Add the help center as a site.
3. Use Submit sitemap and paste the URL.

Bing also accepts an IndexNow ping. Ochre does not currently support IndexNow ping-on-publish; we are tracking it.

Other engines

Most search engines will discover the sitemap via your robots.txt, which Ochre also generates and includes a Sitemap: directive. So even if you do not submit manually, DuckDuckGo, Brave, and the long tail will find it.

What the sitemap looks like

Standard XML sitemap protocol (<urlset> with <url> entries). Each entry has:

• <loc> the article URL
• <lastmod> the article's last update timestamp
• <changefreq> set to weekly for articles, daily for the home page
• <priority> 0.7 for articles, 1.0 for home, 0.8 for categories

You do not need to know any of this. It is all done. But if you are auditing your SEO setup, you can curl the sitemap and inspect.

Sitemap and gated help centers

If your help center is gated (see Article visibility and gating), the sitemap is empty. Search engines cannot index gated content, so we do not advertise it.

If you switch to gated mode after the sitemap was already submitted, expect Google to start dropping articles from its index over a few weeks. This is correct behavior.

Excluding individual articles

Set the article's meta robots to noindex (see Article SEO). It disappears from the sitemap on the next refresh and Google will eventually drop it from results.

For a temporary exclusion (working on a draft), use draft status instead. Same effect for SEO, no need to remember to flip robots back later.

Sitemap size

Ochre uses a single sitemap file up to 50,000 URLs and 50MB. Above that, we split into multiple files with a sitemap index. Most help centers never come close.

Verifying inclusion

To check that a specific article is in the sitemap:

1. Open https://<your help center>/sitemap.xml in a browser.
2. Use Cmd+F to search for the slug.

If the article is published and indexable but missing, give it a few minutes for the cache to refresh. If it is still missing after an hour, the article likely has a noindex directive somewhere. Check the SEO panel.

What the sitemap doesn't do

Submitting a sitemap does not guarantee indexing. Google decides what to index based on quality, links, freshness, and a thousand other signals. The sitemap just tells Google what exists.

If articles are not getting indexed despite being in the sitemap:

• Make sure the help center has at least one inbound link from your main site (footer is fine).
• Check the article actually has unique, useful content. Thin or duplicate articles get filtered.
• Cross-link articles internally. See Authoring articles.
• Wait. New domains take longer.

Robots.txt

Ochre also generates robots.txt automatically. It allows all user agents and points at the sitemap. If you need to disallow specific paths or block AI crawlers, contact support; we treat robots.txt as platform-level configuration to prevent accidents.

Related

• Article SEO for per-article meta robots.
• Help center custom domain for the domain the sitemap lives on.
• Article analytics for what is getting indexed and read.