Sitemaps & robots.txt
Sitemap exists but is not declared in robots.txt
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on a whole site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth knowing. Small, or only matters in some cases. Read it and decide.
- Based on
- Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.
What is wrong
A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website so search engines can find them easily. You have created a sitemap, but you have not told search engines where it is by declaring it in your robots.txt file—a simple text file that sits in your website's root directory and gives instructions to search engine crawlers.
Why it costs you
Without this declaration, search engines still crawl your site by following links, but they may miss pages, especially newer ones or pages that are not well linked from other parts of your site. They have to work harder to discover your content, which means some pages take longer to appear in search results, or may not appear at all.
How to fix it
Open your robots.txt file (located at yoursite.com/robots.txt) and add a new line that points to your sitemap. The line should read: Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml (replace yoursite.com with your actual domain and sitemap.xml with the correct filename and path if yours is different). Save and upload the file. This takes two minutes and gives search engines a direct route to every page you want indexed.
What the audit tests
- robots.txt points to the sitemap with a Sitemap: line
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