What the visual sitemap shows
Your XML sitemap is the list of pages your site asks Google to crawl. This tool reads that list and draws it by address. Each folder in a URL becomes a branch, and each page hangs off the folder it lives in.
Three things are worth reading: the sections your site is built from, how many pages each one holds, and how many folders deep each address goes. Turn on Outdated pages to color every page by the date its sitemap gives, from green for recent to amber for six months or older. Gray means the sitemap gives no date.
URL depththe deepest URL figure
How to read your map
Name the big branches
Each large branch should be something the business wants to be found for, like guides, products or locations. If you can’t say what a branch is for, open it and look.Spot what shouldn’t be listed
Content systems and plugins often list tag, author and date archives, thank-you pages and test pages. Small branches with odd names are the first place to look.Find the pages that matter
Check that your most important pages are listed, and in the section you’d expect. A page that brings in customers and is missing from the sitemap is the first thing to fix.Read the dates as a hint
With Outdated pages on, an all-amber section hasn’t changed in six months by your sitemap’s account, so its pages may need a refresh. Some sites stamp every page with the same date, and Google only uses these dates when they’re consistently accurate.
Download the complete sitemap as one file
Bigger sites rarely have one sitemap. WordPress SEO plugins split posts, pages and categories into separate files, and Shopify lists products, collections, pages and blog posts in separate sitemaps under one index. The tool opens every file the index lists and combines them, so the map and the download cover the whole site.
The JSON file holds every page and folder in the map with its address, depth, parent and sitemap date, plus the totals and the list of sitemaps read. Import it into a spreadsheet or read it with a script to:
- sort every page by sitemap date and plan your refreshes
- keep a copy before a redesign or migration, then compare afterward so no page goes missing
- hand a client or developer the full page list
What to fix in your sitemap first
Google’s guidance is short. List the URLs you want to see in its search results, use each page’s full canonical address, and keep every sitemap file under 50,000 URLs or 50MB.
Leave out
Tag archives, author pages, thank-you pages and redirected URLs
List
Why Google asks for the URLs you want in its results. Anything else makes the list harder to trust.
Most content systems and SEO plugins write the sitemap for you, so the fix usually lives in their settings. Leave working URLs alone, since changing an address means setting up redirects. Lesson 13 walks through sitemaps and indexing step by step.
Check your sitemap in Search Console
A sitemap only helps if Google can read it. Open the Sitemaps report in Google Search Console and check two columns.
- Status. Success means Google read the file without errors. Couldn’t fetch means it never got the file.
- Discovered pages. How many URLs Google found in it. Compare it with the page count above. If the numbers are far apart, check which sitemap Google has on file.
Listed doesn’t mean indexed. Filter the Page indexing report by your sitemap to see which listed pages Google has indexed, and the reason it gives for the rest.
When the tool can’t find a sitemap
The tool checks robots.txt for a Sitemap: line, then the usual addresses: /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /wp-sitemap.xml and /sitemap-index.xml. If none of them answers, it’s usually one of these.
- The sitemap lives somewhere else. Paste its full address instead of the domain. robots.txt often names it.
- The site blocks automated visitors. Bot protection can send back a web page or an access error instead of the file. On your own site, check your firewall or security plugin.
- There’s no sitemap. WordPress has built one in at /wp-sitemap.xml since version 5.5, and Shopify, Wix and Squarespace publish /sitemap.xml for you. Elsewhere, turn it on in your SEO settings or plugin.
How to find orphan pages
An orphan page is one that no other page on your site links to. Visitors can’t click their way to it, and Google, which finds most pages by following links, has only your sitemap to go on. A sitemap can’t reveal orphans, because it lists pages without the links between them.
Open the Links report in Search Console. Its table of top internally linked pages shows how many links from your own site point at each page. Pages near the bottom, or missing from it, need links from related pages. Lesson 12 shows a simple way to link new pages as you publish them.
