Sitemap Analysis & Generation

Mode 1: Analyze Existing Sitemap

Discover candidates before reporting a sitemap missing:

"${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/claude-seo" run sitemap_discovery.py <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)