Sitemap Monitoring and alerts to pages changed, added, or removed

As in-house SEOs who work on large sites or agencies looking after multiple clients, you have to deal with different teams and people adding and changing pages on a website.

It can be very tricky to be aware of the things other people are doing on a website that can have an impact on SEO

• Writers publishing new pages and amending existing content
• Developers deploying code that changes large sections of a site

Mistakes happen and things break. Developers can accidentally deploy changes that wipe out a category of pages. Writers can publish similar content that cannibalizes a topic.

Not everyone who can change a site has SEO front and center of their mind, or even checks their work upon deployment, and so these changes can go unnoticed for a long period of time. Well, not unnoticed by Google though!

Then there are the changes you do know about, but you are never sure when they are pushed live.

Sitemap Monitor from SEOTesting can help with these scenarios.

It’s part of our Website Monitoring tool that helps SEOs ensure website changes that are rolled out to sites do not negatively affect SEO.

The Sitemap Monitor tool in SEOTesting is a low touch way of keeping track of pages modified, added or removed from a site. Low touch in terms of us not hammering your site with http requests, but picking up changes from XML sitemaps.

Once a day SEOTesting will request the XML sitemap files and send an email alert with any URLs modified (via the LastMod date), added, or removed.

This gives you an awareness of exactly what has been added, changed or removed on a site and prompts you to begin digging deeper to ensure the changes will not negatively impact SEO.

Within SEOTesting you can also report on changes over pre-defined and custom date periods. You can also set up SEO tests within SEOTesting to monitor the impact of the changes made.

Monitor competitors

One of the accidental use cases (thanks to our wonderful customers for their ongoing support and feedback) of our Sitemap Monitoring tool is allowing you to monitor the XML sitemaps of your competitors.This will allow you to monitor the content they are adding, changing, and removing from their site, helping you spot the topics they are targeting and the strategies they are using.

Decide how frequently to Monitor

How often you want SEOTesting to check an XML sitemap is completely up to you. You can choose between daily, weekly or monthly.For your own site, you may decide a daily check is important so you can pick up on any issues as soon as possible. Whereas weekly or monthly monitoring may be sufficient to watch competitors Sitemaps.

What our customers think

We’ve had some great feedback from early users of our Sitemap Monitoring tool

Saving the site from teammates…

Making it easier to look after SEO on client sites…

Helpful for keeping an eye on competitors…

Stay on the ball for when your change requests have been made so you can set up SEO tests