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Rule · Sitemaps

Declared sitemaps can be retrieved and read

SEO-SITEMAP-07C1 Mechanism· w8scanner

Class
C1 Mechanism
Weight
8
Severity on fail
critical
Applies to
Google and Bing

Test this rule on a live site with the XML sitemap checker. Free, no account needed.

Scope and evidence

Evaluated on each sitemap file found. The book marks this requirement STANDARD (the Sitemaps protocol defines the mechanism, §2.1).

Fail conditions

Each condition has a stable code and a reason template. The evaluator fills the placeholders from observed values only; no sentence in a report is generated.

  • not_ok

    The sitemap {sitemap} returned {outcome}, so the URLs it lists cannot be read from it.

  • not_well_formed

    The sitemap {sitemap} is not well-formed XML ({error} at line {line}, column {column}). The Sitemaps protocol requires a UTF-8 XML file with every data value entity-escaped.

  • wrong_root

    The sitemap {sitemap} has the root element <{root}>. The Sitemaps protocol requires <urlset> (or <sitemapindex> for an index) in the sitemap namespace.

The documented fix

Generate sitemaps with an XML serializer, not string concatenation, and serve them with a 200.

Sources, quoted

These are the passages the rule rests on, stored once in the knowledge base and emitted exactly as written. A citation marked for specific conditions appears only on findings with those codes.