The website’s sitemap can no longer be found, or it suddenly lists far fewer pages. Search engines use the sitemap to find and recheck pages, so a broken one can slow down indexing.
What it means
The action has one of two titles. “Sitemap has disappeared” means a sitemap that was there before can’t be read any more. “Sitemap lost half its URLs” means it lists half as many pages as the day before, or fewer.
What triggers it
Once a day, as part of Uptime monitoring, SaaSMaestro reads the sitemap named in robots.txt, or else /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml, and counts its URLs, including up to 10 child sitemaps. A drop is only raised for sitemaps that listed at least 20 URLs. Both are Medium issues. A website that never had a sitemap isn’t flagged.
Common causes
- An SEO plugin that was switched off, updated or reconfigured.
- A migration or redesign that changed the sitemap’s address without updating robots.txt.
- A sitemap generator that failed or timed out partway through.
- Pages that were deliberately removed or merged.
How to fix it
- Open the sitemap in a browser and check it loads and lists the pages you expect.
- If it’s missing or broken, restore it in your CMS or SEO plugin, and make sure robots.txt points to its address.
- If pages were removed on purpose, redirect them to the closest live page, and dismiss the action.
- Resubmit the sitemap in Search Console.
When it clears
A missing sitemap clears at the next daily check that finds one. A drop is compared with the day before, so it clears at the next daily check unless the sitemap shrinks by half again.
After 7 days without the problem, the action drops off the board. If you marked it done and the problem is still detected 14 days later, it returns as “Fix didn’t work”.