Sitemap available

A sitemap gives agents a list of the pages worth reading or indexing.

Category: Discoverability
Standard: Established

What it checks

The extension first looks for Sitemap: lines in robots.txt. If there are none, it fetches /sitemap.xml and checks that the body contains a <urlset> or <sitemapindex> element. A sitemap saves an agent from having to discover pages by following links.

Results

Status	When
Pass	`robots.txt` declares one or more sitemaps
Pass	`/sitemap.xml` exists but is not declared in `robots.txt` (with a recommendation to declare it)
Fail	No sitemap is declared in `robots.txt` and `/sitemap.xml` was not found

How to fix

Publish an XML sitemap and reference it from robots.txt, so agents find it without guessing the path:

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

A sitemap index works too, if you split your sitemap into several files:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-pages.xml</loc>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>