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Empty Sitemaps

Sitemaps which return a 200 status code but don't contain any valid URLs

Priority: Medium

Impact: Negative

What issues it may cause​

Sitemaps should contain some valid URLs so it's likely that the sitemap generation process is failing.

There may be legitimate instances of empty Sitemaps, such as News Sitemaps which may be filtered on publish dates and where no recent content has been published.

How do you fix it​

The sitemap generation process should be checked to understand if it has failed. The sitemaps should either be fixed, or removed so they return a 404 status.

If the Sitemaps appear to contain URLs, check they are absolute URLs as relative URLs in Sitemap are not valid and they must be fully qualified.

What is the positive impact​

Fixing a broken an empty Sitemap so it includes the expected content will help new pages to be discovered.

Removing a redundant Sitemap by returning a 404 status may improve the crawling efficiency of other Sitemaps.

How to fetch the data for this report template​

You will need to run a crawl for report template to generate report. When report has been generated and you have crawl id you can fetch data for the report using the following query:

query GetReportForCrawl($crawlId: ObjectID!, $reportTemplateCode: String!) {
  getCrawl(id: $crawlId) {
    reportsByCode(
      input: {
        reportTypeCodes: Basic
        reportTemplateCodes: [$reportTemplateCode]
      }
    ) {
      rows {
        nodes {
          ... on CrawlSitemaps {
            url
            sitemapType
            httpStatusCode
            urlCount
            restrictedReason
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

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