How to find sitemap.xml path on websites?

Question

How can I find sitemap.xml file of websites?

e.g. Going to stackoverflow/sitemap.xml gets me a 404.

In stackoverflow/robots.txt is written the following:

"this technically isn't valid, since for some godforsaken reason sitemap paths must be ABSOLUTE and not relative. Sitemap: /sitemap.xml"

Kyat

I wonder if there is any solution using Right click -> Inspect option of google chrome. – Acherman

Answer 1

I don't think there's a standard as to the location of the sitemap. That's the reason why you should specify an arbitrary URL to your sitemap when you're adding one using Google's Webmaster Tools.

Placoid

Answer 2

There is no standard, so there is no guarantee. With that said, its common for the sitemap to be self labeled and on the root, like this:

example.com/sitemap.xml

Case is sensitive on some servers, so keep that in mind. If its not there, look in the robots file on the root:

example.com/robots.txt

If you don't see it listed in the robots file head to Google and search this:

site:example.com filetype:xml

This will limit the results to XML files on your target domain. At this point its trial-and-error and based on the specifics of the website you are working with. If you get several pages of results from the Google search phrase above then try to limit the results further:

filetype:xml site:example.com inurl:sitemap

or

filetype:xml site:example.com inurl:products

If you still can't find it you can right-click > "View Source" and do a search (aka: "control find" or Ctrl + F) for .xml to see if there is a reference to it in the code.

Wale

+1 for looking in the robots.txt file- this accounts for the sites that don't have a sitemap.xml in the root directory. Now for the other 20%.... – Coffeepot

Answer 3

The location of the sitemap affects which URLs that it can include, but otherwise there is no standard. Here is a good link with more explaination: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location

Piscine

Answer 4

According to protocol documentation there are at least three options website designers can use to inform sitemap.xml location to search engines:

• Informing each search engine of the location through their provided interface
• Adding url to the robots.txt file
• Submiting url to search engines through http

So, unless they have chosen to publish the sitemap location on their robots.txt file, you cannot really know where they have put their sitemap.xml files.

Extrude

4th option: List multiple sitemap location in the index sitemap.xml specified in robots.txt. – Cabdriver

Answer 5

Use Google Search Operators to find it for you

search google with the below code..

inurl:domain.com filetype:xml click on this to view sitemap search example

change domain.com to the domain you want to find the sitemap. this should list all the xml files listed for the given domain.. including all sitemaps :)

Peaked