Is your sitemap helping or hurting?
We find your sitemap, read every file of it, and tell you what is wrong inside. Worst problem first.
- Your domain or a sitemap URL
- No signup
- Results gone in 24 hours
What this checks
A sitemap is a list of pages you are asking search engines to crawl. When it is wrong it does not fail loudly — it quietly teaches Google to trust it less, and the pages you most want found wait longest.
We find it the way a crawler does: the `Sitemap:` line in your robots.txt first, then `/sitemap.xml` and `/sitemap_index.xml`. Then we read every file, including the ones a sitemap index points to, gzipped or not. The findings are ordered by what they cost you:
A sitemap your robots.txt blocks is never read, whatever it lists.
Files that will not load — a 404, a server error, or your app's HTML page served where the XML should be.
Then the details that erode trust: URLs on another host, `http://` addresses on an https site, duplicates, and lastmod dates that are in the future or cannot be read.
What we do not do
We read the sitemap, not the pages it lists — usually two requests to your server in all. Whether every listed page actually works is a separate, larger check.
Sitemap questions
Do I need a sitemap at all?
Search engines find most pages by following links, so a small, well linked site does fine without one. A sitemap matters most for large sites, new sites with few links yet, and pages buried deep in the structure.
Why does a redirect in my sitemap matter?
Every listed URL that redirects is an extra request before Google reaches the page, and a sign the sitemap is out of date. List the final address of each page.
Can a sitemap list pages on another domain?
Not normally. A sitemap may only list pages on its own host, so a mix of www and non-www addresses means half of them are ignored.
How big can a sitemap be?
50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file. Above that, split it into several files and list them in a sitemap index — one index, not an index of indexes, which Google does not follow.