Accessing the Sitemap

Accessing the Sitemap


A sitemap is a list of pages present on your website which you can submit to the search engines. This list serves as a guide for the search engines for better understanding the structure of your website, and ultimately — for easier SEO.

Having a sitemap can help the search engine find pages on your site, which can directly increase the speed of site indexing. However, the sitemap is only a hint to search engines and does not guarantee that Google and other search engines will use it to crawl all pages on the site.


Accessing the sitemap

We generate the sitemap automatically. To access it, simply add /sitemap.xml to your domain name. For example:


https://SiteCliq.com/sitemap.xml


The sitemap is being updated according to the newly added or deleted pages on the site. To make sure that the sitemap contains all the updated info, publish the site each time you make changes on it.


Also, the main sitemap /sitemap.xml may contain links to other sitemaps:

  1. sitemap with a list of regular pages (to open it, you need to add /sitemap_pages.xml to the site address);
  2. sitemap with blog pages (/blog/sitemap.xml after the site address) — it is created automatically after installing the blog on the site;
  3. sitemap for the pages of the online store (/shop/sitemap.xml after the site address) — it is created automatically after activating the online store.

But at the same time, when you use the sitemap (for example, when adding a sitemap to Google Search Console), it is enough to use only the main sitemap /sitemap.xml as the rest of the sitemaps will be detected automatically.


Tip: to submit the sitemap to Google Search Console, check out Google's guides here. To add you site to Google Search Console, see the article Adding your site to the Google Search Console.

"Sitemap can be read, but has errors" in Google Search Console

Sometimes you may see the following error after submitting your sitemap in Google Search Console:

This error occurs if you have specified a canonical link that differs from the actual page address. For example, if your home page URL is https: //domain.com/, and the canonical link you specified in the SEO settings is domain.com, you should replace it with https: //domain.com/. More on how to access the change the canonical link — in our article Adding a canonical link.

Adding a sitemap does not help with indexing

The sitemap crawling can take from a few days up to a few weeks. The waiting time for adding a site to the index (search results) is set by a search engine and is the same for each site (regardless of the platform on which sites are created).

Please be patient and, if you want to, monitor your indexing progress with the Index Status Report or the URL Checker Tool.




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