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Missing from Sitemap

When a website provides a sitemap for search engines, it should list all of the site's public pages. Silktide reports pages it found on your website that are not listed in your sitemap.

An helps search engines discover your pages quickly, and tells them which pages you consider worth indexing. Pages missing from it can still be found by crawling, but more slowly and less reliably - especially new pages and pages with few internal links.

Why this matters

A sitemap is only useful if it is complete and current. When real pages are missing, search engines may take longer to discover new or updated content, and the sitemap stops being a trustworthy statement of what your site contains. Gaps usually mean the sitemap is generated from a stale source, or that whole templates or content types are excluded from generation.

How to fix it

  1. Regenerate the sitemap so it includes every public page. Most content management systems and SEO plug-ins can rebuild it automatically whenever content changes - prefer this to maintaining a file by hand.
  2. If whole groups of pages are missing, check your sitemap generator's settings: content types, languages, or subfolders are often excluded by default.
  3. Make sure the URLs in the sitemap exactly match the pages' actual addresses (same scheme, same host). A sitemap listing http:\/\/ URLs will not match pages served at https:\/\/.
  4. If a page is deliberately excluded - for example a private page behind a log-in - the finding.

How Silktide tests this

  1. Discover your sitemap from your file and the standard \/sitemap.xml location, and collect every URL it lists (including nested sitemaps).
  2. Test each page found during the scan, skipping the site's 404 page and pages set to (those should not be in a sitemap).
  3. Pass the page if either its own URL or its appears in the sitemap.
  4. Flag the page if neither matches. If no sitemap exists at all, this check does not run - see the Sitemap check instead.

Troubleshooting

Pages are flagged that I can see in my sitemap

URLs are matched exactly, so a small difference in scheme (http vs https), host (www vs non-www), or path can make a listed page look missing. Update the sitemap to use the same URLs your pages are actually served at, or set a canonical URL on the page that matches the sitemap entry.

Private or logged-in pages are flagged

If your scan is configured to test pages behind a log-in, those pages should usually not be in a public sitemap. Approve those findings.

Learn more

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