SeoGuard
Warning Alerts at once indexing.sitemap-missing

The site has no sitemap

Why it matters

A sitemap is the list of pages you want search engines to know about. It isn't required: Google says "If your site's pages are properly linked, Google can usually discover most of your site", and that you might not need one when the site is "small", which it puts at "about 500 pages or fewer", and well linked internally. It helps most when a site is large, is new with few links pointing at it, or has pages that aren't well linked together. It costs nothing, every CMS can write one, and it is how we know which pages to check: without it we follow links from the home page instead.

Source: Learn about sitemaps. So this is a notice on a small site and a warning once we find more than 500 pages. It is marked urgent because a sitemap that was there last week and has gone is usually a broken deploy.

How to fix it

Switch it on in your CMS or SEO plugin (WordPress has one built in at /wp-sitemap.xml; Yoast, Rank Math, Shopify, Squarespace and Wix all write one). Then tell crawlers where it is, in robots.txt:

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

We look at the Sitemap: lines of robots.txt first, then /sitemap.xml.

Examples

These are the rule's own test pages, and what it says about each. They are run on every change to the rule book.

NoticeWe found no sitemap: robots.txt names none and there is nothing at /sitemap.xml. We followed links from the home page instead.

fail-none
Example site 
{
    "sitemap": {
        "found": false
    },
    "pages": [
        {
            "url": "/",
            "inSitemap": false
        }
    ]
}

PassedThe site has a sitemap, listing 2 of its pages.

pass-has-sitemap
Example site 
{
    "pages": [
        {
            "url": "/"
        },
        {
            "url": "/about"
        }
    ]
}