The shape of a site, from its sitemap
A sitemap lists the pages a site wants indexed. Broken down the right way, it tells you how the site is built and where it’s growing. We read the whole sitemap (index and child files, each URL once) and report:
- Top sections. URLs grouped by first folder (
/blog/,/docs/) or first two folders (/blog/guides/). This is the quickest way to see what a site is made of. - Folder depth. How many path segments each URL has. Most sites cluster at depth 1 or 2.
- lastmod by month. When pages were last changed, for the last 24 months that have dates, plus how many changed in the last 30 and 90 days.
- File types and hosts. Extensions such as .html or .pdf, and whether all URLs are on one host.
- URL hygiene. URLs with query strings, trailing-slash consistency, and URLs over 115 characters.
What to look for
- One section dwarfs the rest. Fine if it’s your product catalogue or docs. Worth a second look if it’s tag pages or thin, auto-generated pages.
- A spike of pages in one month. A bulk launch. Publishing thousands of pages at once can outrun how fast Google crawls and indexes a young site; check the indexed count in Search Console.
- Nothing updated in a year. Stale lastmod on pages you did update means the sitemap isn’t wired to real edit dates.
- Query-string URLs. Sitemaps should list canonical URLs; parameter variants usually shouldn’t be there.
For protocol errors, run the sitemap validator. To compare two points in time, use sitemap compare.