Sitemap

[Happy-SEO]

I have a question for the links in a sitemap. Wordpress works with a sitemap that first link to the different kind of pages:

• pagesitemap.xml
• categorysitemap.xml
• productsitemap.xml
• etc. etc.

These links on the first page are clickable. We have a website that also links to the different pages but it's not clickable, just a flat link. Is this an issue?

[GPainter]

Hello,

WordPress has a habit of breaking sitemaps into categories, for me this is unnecessary as a normal sitemap can hold 50k of urls. In each of those categories is a smaller sitemap which is working as it should, if you are worried you can check the sitemap status in your search engine console - formal webmaster tools.  One last fun one, there are two kinds of sitemap one for users and one for bots, the .xml kind is for bots if you were curious its not normal to click on a sitemap as seen here- https://moz.com/sitemap.xml (that is also directing to other sitemaps but thats per sides the point)

Hope that helps.

[Ria_]

This isn't an issue, and most sites don't provide clickable links to their sitemap/s.

I would recommend adding your sitemap URLs to Google's Search Console though, to help Google crawl your site more efficiently.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en

[ThompsonPaul]

Those links are made into hrefs (eg made clickable) by xml styling that's been applied. It's purely for user convenience - doesn't matter to search engines either way.

There is actually a massive benefit to having multiple sub-sitemaps like that though. Once you've submitted the sitemap index to Google Search Console, it will break out the crawling and indexing report for each sub-sitemap. Which means you will now be able to monitor and asses each of different sections of your site separately. Vastly easier to detect and fix crawl errors that way than when everything's lumped into a single sitemap.

Paul