XML Sitemap automatically creates a site map that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines keep their search results up to date.

XML Sitemap includes optional modules which allow the site administrator to customize the site map output and submit the site map to search engines automatically.

Drupal serves the 'sitemap.xml' file from the cached file XML Sitemap generates via hook_menu(). It does not write the sitemap.xml file to your file structure.

Before you install or upgrade

1. Always backup your site and database.
2. When you are upgrading the XML Sitemap module to a new version, be sure to delete the old module files before copying the new ones to your sites/all/modules folder. The new version of XML Sitemap can adopt a different directory structure, and you could inadvertently have duplicates of module files if you do not follow the above instructions.
3. Be sure to always execute the update of Drupal through update.php; if update.php is not executed, the database tables are not being updated, and this will cause SQL query errors provoked by the difference between the fields name used by the code, and the name of the fields really present in the database.
4. After using update.php, visit /admin/reports/status, and verify there aren't warning (or error) messages given by XML Sitemap; if there are any messages, follow what they suggest you to do.