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Sitemap

Websites should provide a sitemap, a machine-readable list of their pages that helps search engines find and index content quickly. Silktide checks that your website has one it can discover.

An lists the URLs you want indexed, optionally with details like when each page last changed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http:\/\/www.sitemaps.org\/schemas\/sitemap\/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https:\/\/example.com\/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-07-01</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Why this matters

Without a sitemap, search engines discover your pages only by following links, so new pages, deep pages, and pages with few internal links can take much longer to be found - or be missed entirely. A sitemap also tells search engines when content changed, so updates are re-crawled sooner.

The larger the site, the more this matters: crawlers budget how many pages they fetch, and a sitemap helps them spend that budget on the pages you care about.

How to fix it

  1. Generate an XML sitemap. Most content management systems and SEO plugins can create and update one automatically; prefer that over a hand-maintained file.
  2. Serve it at a conventional location, normally https:\/\/example.com\/sitemap.xml.
  3. Declare it in your file so crawlers (and Silktide) can find it:
Sitemap: https:\/\/example.com\/sitemap.xml
  1. Keep it current - a sitemap that omits new pages or lists deleted ones erodes search engines' trust in it.

How Silktide tests this

  1. Look for sitemaps at the standard \/sitemap.xml location and in any Sitemap: lines in your robots.txt file.
  2. Follow sitemap index files to any nested sitemaps and collect the page URLs they list.
  3. Flag the website if no sitemap URLs could be found.

Troubleshooting

My website has a sitemap but Silktide does not find it

Check the following, in order:

  • Location - the sitemap must be at \/sitemap.xml or declared with a Sitemap: line in robots.txt. A sitemap at a custom path with no robots.txt reference cannot be discovered.
  • Validity - the file must be valid XML in the sitemap format, including the correct xmlns attribute and encoding. An invalid sitemap cannot be parsed, so it counts as not found. Validate it with an online sitemap validator.
  • Availability - the URL must return the file successfully, not an error page or a login redirect.

Learn more

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