Sample sitemap audit report

An anonymized sample sitemap audit report: the pages table, the issues it flags — stale 404s, missing titles, canonical mismatches — and how to read them.

Illustrative sample. The company, domain, and every URL below are fictional and anonymized — this is what a finished sitemap audit looks like, not a real site's data.

The audited site (fictional)

Northwind Traders, a fictional mid-size B2B software company at shop.northwind.example. Sitemap index with 4 child sitemaps, claimed 2,041 URLs.

Report summary

• 2,041 URLs listed in the sitemap index
• 1,976 fetched successfully (200 OK)
• 41 stale URLs returning 404
• 24 URLs redirecting elsewhere (301)
• 17 pages missing a meta description; 9 with duplicate titles

Pages table (excerpt)

URL	Status	Title	H1	Finding
/pricing/	200	Pricing — Northwind	Plans & pricing	Clean
/features/old-beta/	404	—	—	Stale — dead page still in sitemap
/blog/2021-launch/	200	Blog — Northwind	—	Missing H1; generic duplicate title
/docs/quickstart/	200	Quickstart	Quickstart	Canonical mismatch — canonical points to /docs/
/webinars/2022-recap/	301	—	—	Sitemap lists a redirecting URL — list the final URL instead
/about/	200	About	About us	Thin — 120 words, no meta description

What the findings led to

1. Purged 41 stale URLs from the sitemap — dead pages the site had deleted but never unlisted, wasting crawl budget.
2. Replaced 24 redirecting entries with their final destination URLs.
3. Rewrote duplicate/generic titles across the blog template and added the missing H1s.
4. Fixed the docs canonical — the quickstart page was telling search engines not to index it.

How sitemap enumeration works · how to read a full report.