Sitemap monitoring is now available at Oh Dear

Oh Dear can perform many checks: uptime, broken links, scheduled jobs, DNS, and much more. We proud to announce that we’ve added a new check: sitemap monitoring. This check will make sure that the structure of your sitemap is correct. We’ll also check if each and every link it links to a page that returns a correct response.

Whenever we detect a problem, you’ll be notified via one of our many supported notification channels.

What is a sitemap?

Sitemaps play an essential role in SEO. Having sitemaps with no errors helps to ensure search engines index your web pages correctly. With sitemap monitoring, you are assured you will be informed when your sitemap(s) condition degrades.

Technically, a sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.

How Oh Dear monitors your sitemap

We can monitor your sitemap by checking if it's available and if the structure is valid. We will also visit each URL in the sitemap to check if it's available and if it returns a response code in the 200 or 300 range.

We will check the following things when monitoring your sitemap. We will check if:

• the sitemap is available at the specified URL
• visit each URL in the sitemap to check if it's available and if it returns a response code in the 200 or 300 range
• all URLs are unique
• the sitemap doesn't contain more than 50,000 URLs
• the priority of each item is between 0 and 1
• the frequency of each item is one of these values: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never
• last modified of each item is not in the future

If you are using a sitemap index, we will perform all these checks for all sitemaps mentioned in the index file. We also support gzipped sitemap indexes and sitemaps

How to configure Oh Dear to monitor your site map

When you create a new site in Oh Dear, you can toggle on the sitemap check. Let's try it out by monitoring the semrush.com domain

We’ll try to check the sitemap located at <your-domain>/sitemap.xml. If your sitemap is saved somewhere else, you can specify a custom URL in the sitemap check settings.

Oh Dear will now check the structure of your sitemap and crawl all links. When the checking process is finished, you’ll see a report like this one.