Add selective URLs to an XML Sitemap

Question

My website has a very large no of pages. I am looking to create an XML Sitemap that contains only the most important pages (category pages etc).

However, on crawling the website in a tool like Xenu (the others have a 500 page limit), I am unable to control which pages get added to the XML Sitemap, and which ones get excluded.

Essentially, I only want pages that are upto 4 clicks away from my homepage to show up in the XML Sitemap.

How should I create an XML sitemap, and at the same time control which pages of my site I add to it (category pages), and which ones I remove (product pages etc).

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Do not create the XML-Sitemap on your own. You just cannot do it every other day, i.e. contents will become invalid over time.

At least Bing has a very tight tolerance limit when it comes to invalid URLs there:

If we see more than 1% of the URLs in a given sitemap returning errors, we begin to distrust the sitemap and stop visiting it.

Let your CMS create the XML-Sitemap for you, if possible. If not: It's ok. It's not a problem if your site is missing a sitemap. (In the vast majority of the cases) you won't rank better just because of having one.