@passmarked/seo/docs/sitemap.empty.md

Rules related to checking for any SEO issues on the page given

Sitemaps (although not that widely used anymore but still a valid standard) allow site owners to give search engines lists of URLs that might be hard to find while doing a normal crawl of the website.

These sitemaps must be an XML file on the root of the site, namely `/sitemap.xml`.

The sitemap returned by the website was empty, nada, nothing ... After parsing the file no structure could be found, this indicates an empty file. Meaning any search engines trying to parse the file will not find any URLs and might even mark the sitemap parsing as a failure.

# How do I fix this ?

Look at defining at least the bare minimum for some structure in the file, while you're at it go ahead and add some urls too.

The basic structure of a sitemap is:

```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/about</loc>
   </url>
</urlset> 
```

# Resources

* [Sitemaps XML format](http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html)