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Rule · Sitemaps

A sitemap is published

SEO-SITEMAP-08C2 Recommended· w4scanner

Class
C2 Recommended
Weight
4
Severity on fail
major
Applies to
Bing

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

Scope and evidence

Evaluated on site. The book marks this requirement OPTIONAL (Google); DOCUMENTED SIGNAL, SEARCH-ENGINE-SPECIFIC (Bing, lastmod).

An opportunity, never a failure. Scored for Bing only: the registry holds no verbatim Google recommendation to publish a sitemap, and G-STARTER says one isn't required. A sitemap never improves rankings (§6).

Fail and opportunity 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. An opportunity condition fires when the documented practice is absent and nothing is broken by its absence; it counts in the score like a fail and is reported as something to add.

  • none_foundopportunity

    No sitemap was declared in robots.txt, configured, or found at /sitemap.xml. Bing describes the lastmod field in your sitemap as a key signal that helps it prioritize URLs for recrawling and reindexing, and a site without a sitemap sends that signal for none of its pages. Google says a sitemap isn't required. Without one, the scanner inferred which pages you intend to have indexed (PRODUCT.md §7.4).

The documented fix

Publish an XML sitemap that lists every URL you want indexed, with an accurate lastmod including the time, and declare it with a Sitemap: line in robots.txt.

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.