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sitemap.entry.non-canonical

A sitemap should list canonical URLs

warningsite-widevendor-spec

Why it matters

The sitemap is the list of what you want indexed, so it should name the URL you actually prefer. Listing a variant that points elsewhere spends crawl budget arriving at a page that immediately says "not me".

What the finding looks like

The message goflag prints, with example values substituted.

warn sitemap.entry.non-canonical 1 sitemap entry names a page whose canonical points elsewhere: https://example.com/a?ref=x → https://example.com/a. The sitemap is a list of what to index, so it should name the URL the site itself prefers.

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 vendor-spec, and it cites the documents 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.