Discoverability · 30 points
Sitemap URL quality
One check, stated three ways: what we measure, what would make it wrong, and how to confirm it yourself.
What this measures
A bounded sample (up to 4) of pages listed in your sitemap: their status, redirects, content type, robots directive, canonical and whether titles repeat.
Where this check can be wrong
Four sampled pages is not your site. A clean sample can hide a broken tail, and a bad sample can be one redirect rule. Never read this as a full crawl.
Verify it without taking our word for it
curl -s https://your.site/sitemap.xml, take the <loc> values yourself and check them with curl -I one by one.