Check if your sitemap lists pages you never built

Your website hands Google a list of its pages. It's called a sitemap. Some lists get optimistic: roof repair in every town in the county, when you've built a handful. Lovely neighborhood. No houses yet.

And look, I love building pages. I'd build one for every cul-de-sac. But build first, list second. A clean list won't guarantee you show up in Google. A broken one is just a cleanup job, and you can start it today.

1. Find your sitemap. Type your domain followed by /sitemap.xml into your browser. Some sites use /sitemap_index.xml, which links to smaller lists. If neither opens, ask whoever runs your website where it lives.
2. Size it up. It's a long column of web addresses. Compare it with the pages you know you have. If you built a few town pages and the list has one for every town you've ever driven through, that's your first clue.
3. Open a sample. Click a few from the top, the middle and the bottom, especially town and service pages. Each one should open a real page with real content. Not "page not found," not a blank template, not a bounce back to your homepage.
4. Take off anything that doesn't open. Collect the bad addresses and send them to whoever runs your website (message below). They come off the list until the page is built. While they're in there: pages set to "noindex," a setting that tells Google to skip a page, shouldn't be on the list either.
5. Fix the source, then re-check. If your website builder makes the list automatically, the fix lives in the builder or the page settings, not in a hand edit the next update overwrites. Check again after every batch of new pages.

Send this to your web person, developer or agency:

Hi [name],

I checked our sitemap at [yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml].
These addresses are on it but don't open a real page:

- [address 1]
- [address 2]
- [address 3]

Can you take them off the sitemap until those pages are built?
While you're in there, please make sure:
1. Every address on the list opens a real page.
2. Pages set to "noindex" aren't on the list.
3. New pages get added when they go live, not before.

Thanks!

Ridgeline Roofing, a fictional company, serves a county with 30 towns. Their sitemap lists a "roof repair" page and a "roof replacement" page for every one of them: 60 town addresses. They've actually built 5.

The owner opens 10 of the 60 at random. Nine come back "page not found." He pastes the bad ones into the message above and sends it. The developer trims the list to the pages that exist plus the main pages of the site, and sets new town pages to join the list when they're published.

Did that make Ridgeline rank anywhere? Nobody can promise that. What it did is stop sending Google on a tour of empty lots.

• Thinking a longer list is a better list. It's only as good as the pages behind it.
• Hand-editing a list your website builder regenerates. The next update puts the junk right back.
• Listing pages now "for later." Build first, list second.
• Expecting a clean list to get you ranked. It's a cleanup job, not a ranking trick.

Invite Google to the pages you have. Cut the ribbon on the imaginary expansion later.