Why does the crawl report say I should have meta description and title tags in my xml files?

[PandyLegend]

Just had my first crawl report today which has been very useful in finding missing and duplicated title tags and meta descriptions but it has flagged up the fact that my xml files are missing these. Surely non HTML documents shouldn't have them (or need them) so why are they showing up in the report?

[Highland]

Are your XML files returning a proper application type? If it's being shown as "text/html" it's possible the bot got confused.

[YannickVeys]

Highland has a good suggestion. Otherwise:

You might have found a bug there There shouldn't be any title tags and description tags in XML files. So I suggest you submit it as a bug.

Other thought that comes up: why does the crawler find XML files? That (probably?) means that you're linking to those files on your site? Which isn't really necessary You only need to link to it in your robots.txt file or submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.

[PandyLegend]

Thanks Yannick.

The site does link to sitemaps in XML, RSS, OPML, Text and HTML formats. This has been advised not for Google but for other search engines and bots which may be crawling the site. There are also links to RSS feeds which are showing in the report as well.

Highland - the XML files are generated by a third party so I would hope they are returning proper application type! The browser certainly renders them as XML.

[YannickVeys]

Hi Pandy,

Could you give me a heads up on the resource that says you should link to your sitemap.xml? Interested in reading that

In my experience, search engines expect the sitemap to be at www.root.com/sitemap.xml so there would be no need to link to it from your site.

[PandyLegend]

TBH it's a while ago I heard it and can't remember which site it was on. I've subscribed to so many SEO forums!!

Happy to get fresh advice on the matter as I have no particular desire to have the sitemaps crawlable or visible on the site. What are your feelings about ROR, RSS and OPML sitemaps?