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goflag
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Rule catalogue

sitemap.empty

A sitemap that parses should list something

warningsite-wideguideline

Why it matters

goflag falls back to crawling, so the audit survives. A search engine does not fall back: it reads the file it was pointed at, finds nothing, and moves on.

What the finding looks like

The message goflag prints, with example values substituted.

warn sitemap.empty The sitemap parses and lists no URLs, while the crawl found 42. goflag falls back to crawling — a consumer that trusts the sitemap has nothing to read.

How to fix it

The catalogue carries no snippet for a site rule: a cross-page rule builds its remedy from what the crawl found, so goflag attaches the fix to the finding itself rather than to the rule. Run it and read the finding.

Says who?

This rule is guideline, and it cites the document below. Nothing here is goflag’s opinion of what a good page looks like — if you disagree with a finding, this is what you are disagreeing with.