docs: "Set up Sphinx sitemaps" gives too many choices ;)

[Saviq]

I'm working to validate the sitemaps generated in our pages, but am presented with too many choices in the starter pack :)

It is recommended to generate a sitemap for your documentation using the sphinx-sitemap extension.

But then, RTD sitemaps are referred to across the doc…

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Configuring your versioned documentation to use an appropriate version may be sufficient

if you want comprehensive sitemaps for your documentation and all its versions

Do I want them…?

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I would like to know what's the best practice that I should follow…

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Reported from: https://canonical-starter-pack.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/how-to/set-up-sitemaps/

[SecondSkoll]

So RTD produces sitemaps but they are not best practice sitemaps (they do not enumerate all pages or provide modification dates), so we recommend using the sphinx-sitemap extension instead.

Providing sitemaps for all your documentation versions might be a good idea in some circumstances, but the only circumstance I can think of for us is LTS releases of software. Sitemaps help with indexation and adding weight to some pages in search results. However, duplication detracts from search-ability - so commonalities between versions are bad.

In the end, old versions are indexed by search engines crawling the content anyway - so having versions of your old docs in your main sitemap/sitemap index is probably not necessary.