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Sitemap structure analyzer

The shape of your site: depth, sections, priorities and hosts.

Free, no signup, and it runs entirely in your browser.

Sitemap XML

About this tool

A sitemap is the most complete description of a site that exists in one file, and almost nobody reads it as one. Depth distribution shows how far a crawler has to walk to reach anything; section sizes show where the pages actually are; and both are usually a surprise to the person who built the site.

  • Pages four or five levels deep get crawled less. If most of your content sits down there, that is a flattening problem, not a content problem.
  • Priority values are relative to your own pages only, and they do not compete with other sites. A sitemap where everything is 1.0 has said nothing at all.
  • URLs on http are flagged. If the site redirects to https, each one costs a redirect hop on every crawl of every page.
  • More than one host in a single sitemap means the extra hosts are ignored, unless cross-submission is verified in Search Console.

Questions

How deep should URLs be?
Three levels or fewer for anything important. Depth correlates with how often a page is crawled, so burying content costs it visits.
Should every page have priority 1.0?
No, and it achieves nothing. Priority is a relative hint among your own pages, so setting everything to the maximum makes it uniform and therefore meaningless.
Can one sitemap cover several domains?
Only with cross-submission verified in Search Console. Otherwise every URL outside the sitemap’s own host is ignored.

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