---
name: ship-a-clean-sitemap
description: "Only real public pages, every URL 200, self-canonical, with a unique title and description."
---

# Ship a clean sitemap

Purpose:: https://<domain>/sitemap.xml is clean and every page in it is ready to rank.

Rules::
- Only real public pages: no login, signup, dashboard, account or noindex pages
- Every URL: 200, https on the domain, canonical = itself, unique title and description
- Fix only the sitemap, robots and page metadata

Inventory::
- The live sitemap.xml and robots.txt
- A metadata checker (or curl + grep for title, description, canonical)

Steps::
1. Fetch the sitemap; check the XML, URLs on the domain, lastmod
2. Remove non-indexable routes; add missing public pages
3. Check every URL's status, canonical, title and description; fix empty or duplicate ones
4. robots.txt allows / and points to the sitemap
5. Deploy and check again
6. Reply in one line: URL count, zero errors

Metrics::
- Zero errors on the second check
- Every page in it could rank on its own

Source:: https://isklls.com/skills/ship-a-clean-sitemap (iSklls, free skill library)