Submitting your sitemap to search engines
A sitemap is a plain list of your site's pages, in a format search engines can read directly. It won't make a bad page rank, but it helps a good one get noticed sooner.
Search engines find pages by following links and by reading sitemaps you tell them about. For a small site with only a handful of pages, following links usually works eventually on its own — a sitemap mostly helps you get indexed faster, and helps you notice if a page you expected to be indexed isn't.
Most website builders and content management systems generate a sitemap file automatically, usually at an
address like yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. If yours doesn't, free plugins or built-in features in
almost every modern site builder will create one without custom code.
Once you have a sitemap address, add your site to Google Search Console (free) and submit the sitemap URL there. Search Console will also tell you, over the following days, which pages it has indexed and flag any it couldn't — the single most useful free diagnostic available to a small site owner, and one most vacation rental owners never open.
Resubmitting the same sitemap won't speed anything up once it's already been read; what helps is fixing whatever Search Console flags (a page blocked by mistake, a broken redirect) and letting the next crawl pick up the fix. See Google's own indexing documentation for how the process works end to end.