seo-sitemap

Analyze existing XML sitemaps or generate new ones with industry templates. Validates format, URLs, and structure. Use when user says "sitemap", "generate sitemap", "sitemap issues", or "XML sitemap".

asale ai@asale-ai

Install

openclaw skills install @asale-ai/seo-sitemap

Sitemap Analysis & Generation

Mode 1: Analyze Existing Sitemap

Discover candidates before reporting a sitemap missing:

bash

seogeo sitemap-discovery <url> --json

The helper reads every bounded Sitemap: declaration in robots.txt, validates cross-host targets through the shared SSRF-safe fetch layer, and still probes common paths when a declared sitemap is stale or invalid. Use only entries in found; preserve declared failures as findings instead of treating a robots.txt line alone as proof that a sitemap works.

Validation Checks

Valid XML format
Per-file limit: ≤50,000 URLs AND ≤50MB uncompressed (whichever is hit first)
All URLs return HTTP 200
<lastmod> accurate: must be a valid W3C Datetime and reflect the last significant content change (main content, structured data, links, not copyright/boilerplate edits). Google only honours <lastmod> when consistently and verifiably accurate, so warn when values are suspiciously uniform or newer than the page's real content.
No deprecated tags: <priority> and <changefreq> are ignored by Google
Sitemap referenced in robots.txt
Compare crawled pages vs sitemap; flag missing pages

Quality Signals

Sitemap index file if >50k URLs
Split by content type (pages, posts, images, videos)
No non-canonical URLs in sitemap
No noindexed URLs in sitemap
No redirected URLs in sitemap
HTTPS URLs only (no HTTP)

Common Issues

Issue	Severity	Fix
>50k URLs in single file	Critical	Split with sitemap index
>50MB uncompressed single file	Critical	Split with sitemap index
Non-200 URLs	High	Remove or fix broken URLs
Noindexed URLs included	High	Remove from sitemap
Redirected URLs included	Medium	Update to final URLs
All identical lastmod	Low	Use actual modification dates
Priority/changefreq used	Info	Can remove (ignored by Google)

Extension sitemaps (image / video / news)

Google documents three subtypes with their own rules, validate per-subtype:

Image (http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1): only two valid tags remain, <image:image> and <image:loc> (max 1,000 <image:image> per <url>). <image:caption>/<image:geo_location>/<image:title>/ <image:license> were deprecated (2022), flag as info-level removable.
Video: required <video:video> with <video:thumbnail_loc>, <video:title>, <video:description>, plus <video:content_loc> or <video:player_loc>; mRSS also supported. Flag deprecated/removed tags (<video:category>, <video:gallery_loc>, <video:price>, <video:tvshow>, player autoplay/allow_embed) as info-level removable; recheck Google docs before citing a removal date.
News: max 1,000 <news:news> per file (not 50,000); include only articles from the last 2 days; required <news:publication>/<news:name>/ <news:language>/<news:publication_date>/<news:title>; submit/discover through Search Console or robots.txt/sitemap index; use Publisher Center only for publication management where relevant. When the news: namespace is detected, override the generic 50k check with the 1,000 cap.

Mode 2: Generate New Sitemap

Process

Ask for business type (or auto-detect from existing site)
Load industry template from ../seo-plan/assets/ directory
Interactive structure planning with user
Apply quality gates:
- ⚠️ WARNING at 30+ location pages (require 60%+ unique content)
- 🛑 HARD STOP at 50+ location pages (require justification)
Generate valid XML output
Split at whichever comes first: 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed, with sitemap index
Generate STRUCTURE.md documentation

Safe Programmatic Pages (OK at scale)

✅ Integration pages (with real setup docs) ✅ Template/tool pages (with downloadable content) ✅ Glossary pages (200+ word definitions) ✅ Product pages (unique specs, reviews) ✅ User profile pages (user-generated content)

Penalty Risk (avoid at scale)

❌ Location pages with only city name swapped ❌ "Best [tool] for [industry]" without industry-specific value ❌ "[Competitor] alternative" without real comparison data ❌ AI-generated pages without human review and unique value

Sitemap Format

Standard Sitemap

xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/page</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-02-07</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Sitemap Index (for >50k URLs)

xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-pages.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-02-07</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-posts.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-02-07</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Error Handling

URL unreachable: Report the HTTP status code and suggest checking if the site is live
No sitemap found: Run seogeo sitemap-discovery and report "not found" only when its found list is empty after declared and common candidates are checked
Invalid XML format: Report specific parsing errors with line numbers
Rate limiting detected: Back off and report partial results with a note about retry timing

Output

For Analysis

VALIDATION-REPORT.md: analysis results
Issues list with severity
Recommendations

For Generation

sitemap.xml (or split files with index)
STRUCTURE.md: site architecture documentation
URL count and organization summary

Tooling

bash

# Find every sitemap: robots.txt declarations plus the well-known paths
seogeo sitemap-discovery https://example.com --json

# Pull the URL list out of the discovered sitemaps
seogeo crawl-sitemap https://example.com --max-pages 500 --json

# What Search Console thinks of the submitted sitemaps
seogeo gsc-sitemaps --property https://example.com/ --json

sitemap-discovery reports every candidate it checked, not just the ones that worked, so a 404 on /sitemap.xml is visible rather than silent. Each entry carries kind (urlset, sitemapindex, rss, feed, text) and, on failure, a specific error.

Two safety behaviours worth knowing when you read the output:

Sitemaps declared in robots.txt may legitimately live on another host. Those are fetched, but flagged with cross_host: true.
Query strings are stripped from displayed URLs and the entry is marked query_redacted, so a signed sitemap URL never lands in a report.

crawl-sitemap follows <sitemapindex> entries into their child sitemaps automatically and stops at --max-pages.