Not in the sitemap

Why it matters

The sitemap is the list of pages you ask Google to index. A page that is missing from it still gets found, but later and less often. For paginated and filter pages that is fine. For a real page it is usually an oversight.

How Snaglist checks it

Snaglist reads the sitemaps of the site and compares them with every indexable HTML page it crawled. Every indexable page that answers with 200 and does not appear in a sitemap is listed, with how Snaglist found it. This check uses only the crawl itself, not Search Console. Without a sitemap, Snaglist does not report this.

Snaglist reports this as a notice. It costs 5 percent of the page in the health score. Good to know, and sometimes a deliberate choice.

Common causes

• A page type that the SEO plugin leaves out of the sitemap
• Paginated or filtered pages, which do not belong in the sitemap
• A sitemap that is generated once and not updated
• A page that was published after the sitemap was last built

How to fix it

1. Decide for each page whether it should be found in Google.
2. If so, add it to the sitemap, usually by including its page type in the sitemap settings.
3. If not, set it to noindex so the signals agree.
4. Submit the sitemap again in Search Console.

How it shows in the report

In the report for your client this appears under the heading "Pages you do not submit to Google". When everything is in order, the report says: "Every indexable page is in the sitemap".