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Sitemap monitoring
Validate a sitemap and bounded listed-URL health on the fixed daily cadence supported by Watchfox.
When to use Sitemap#
Use Sitemap when the sitemap itself and obvious health of listed URLs are part of your website maintenance workflow. Watchfox performs bounded validation within the supported sitemap scope; it is not a full-site deep crawler.
Create the monitor#
- Open Monitors and click New Monitor.
- Select Sitemap.
- Enter a friendly label.
- Enter the direct sitemap URL, commonly
https://example.com/sitemap.xml. - Create the monitor.
Sitemap monitoring runs on a fixed 24-hour cadence because it is a heavier validation check, not a one-minute Uptime probe.
Expected result#
The result should distinguish a valid sitemap from parsing, fetch, broken-link, redirect, or scope-limited findings. Review counts and examples before changing the site or monitor.
Redirect findings#
A redirected sitemap URL is not always broken, but it can reveal stale canonical URLs or unnecessary crawl hops. Review whether the sitemap should list the final canonical URL directly.
Common mistakes#
- Entering a normal webpage instead of the direct sitemap URL.
- Expecting all website links to be crawled beyond sitemap scope.
- Treating the daily cadence as a failed scheduler.
- Ignoring large numbers of redirects because the final pages still load.
- Assuming every finding is a current outage without opening representative URLs.