sitemap bug

Howdy!

That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.

XSLT stands for “eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations” and is embedded by linking the .xsl file. This XSLT file makes the sitemap look like a styled webpage by applying transformations to the XML document.

You can find it in the /sitemap.xml document source header:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="https://theseoframework.com/sitemap.xsl"?>

Search engines ignore this file, but if they stumble upon it, they are told not to index it.

You can safely disable it at “SEO Settings > Sitemap Settings > Style” by unchecking “Style sitemap.”

• This reply was modified 3 months ago by Sybre Waaijer.

It looks like this feature isn’t working. It’s causing an error in Google Console.

If I disable the Style Sitemap, I’ll lose both sitemaps, and then I’ll have to install an additional plugin just for the sitemap.

Hi again!

The XSLT stylesheet is a programming script and cannot be used independently; an XML document is required to process the script.

When accessing the stylesheet directly, you’ll only see pointers instead of actual data. {$itemURL} is such a pointer that refers to the sitemap URL location (<url><loc>) field. When the XSLT stylesheet is loaded via an XML document, {$itemURL} transforms into the URL location data.

Here’s what our stylesheet looks like when accessed directly: https://theseoframework.com/sitemap.xsl. Because it cannot find any references in an XML document, everything looks broken. But here’s what it looks like when attached to the XML document: https://theseoframework.com/sitemap.xml.

Google says they attempt to parse anything that looks like a URL: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable.

This includes the {$itemURL} because it’s written like this a URL in the XSL document: <a href="{$itemURL}">.
Since the URL leads to nothing but a 404 page, they’ll give a soft error message stating that it’s not indexable.

You can safely ignore these errors. Moreover, when read via the XML document, this “broken” URL transforms into an actual URL.

I must stress that because of WordPress’s dynamic nature, you’ll get many of these kinds of errors in Google Search Console. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s also an entry for /search/{search_term_string}, stemming from the Schema.org structured data, which is generated according to Google’s recommendations. You can safely ignore this soft error, as well.

If you disable the sitemap stylesheet, the sitemap will still work. I’m not sure what you’re seeing when you disable the sitemap, but it will look something like this — an XML tree that search engines can easily process:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<!-- Sitemap is generated on 2024-08-23 08:55:49 GMT -->
	<url>
		<loc>https://sidata.com.ua/</loc>
		<lastmod>2024-06-26T06:15:03+00:00</lastmod>
	</url>
	...etc

As for why the logo on the styled sitemap shows an error (next to the sitemap title): The Site Icon you uploaded to your site at “WP Admin > Settings > General” doesn’t exist anymore. See if that needs to be addressed. You can also upload one to “WP Admin > SEO Settings > Sitemap Settings > Style,” which may instead be the one that has disappeared. You can also opt to remove the logo from the stylesheet entirely.

Either way, it can take 30 minutes for changes to show because TSF caches the stylesheet in your browser for that long. If you wish to inspect changes immediately, you could refresh your cache, or inspect the sitemap via another browser (but that one, too, will cache the version they get for another 30 minutes).

I hope this clears up everything. Have a lovely weekend!