Rankelle

No sitemap found

No XML sitemap was found at the usual addresses or declared in robots.txt. Search engines can still find pages by following links, but a sitemap is how they learn about new and rarely-linked pages quickly.

How to fix it

Publish a sitemap at /sitemap.xml and declare it in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line. Most platforms generate one automatically once enabled.

When it is not a problem

A twenty-page site whose every page is linked from the navigation loses almost nothing. A site that publishes daily, or has pages reached only through search, loses discovery time on every one.

How Rankelle handles it

  • SeverityWarning. It costs traffic or clarity without stopping anything, which is where most real work lives.
  • DetectionDetected by comparing pages against each other after the crawl finishes, because no single page can show it on its own.
  • GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question. Causes are ranked by the impressions behind their pages.
  • LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
  • VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing — all four verdicts reach the report.

Try it on your own site, free

The whole audit of every website you add, no card and no expiry. Pay only when you want the proof.