← Check a site

Add a sitemap and a canonical link

Help bots find your pages and know which address is the main copy.

Worth

10

points of 100

4 steps, about 10 minutes

0 of 4 done

  1. Find your sitemap

    Shopify, Wix and WordPress (version 5.5 and later) make one for you. Try yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, and on WordPress also yoursite.com/wp-sitemap.xml.

  2. List it in robots.txt

    Add this line to your robots.txt, with your own sitemap address. See our robots.txt guide for where to edit the file.

    Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

  3. Add a canonical link to the page

    Most site builders and SEO plugins add one automatically. If yours does not, paste this into the page’s <head> section, with the page’s own full address.

    <link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/your-page/">

  4. Check it worked

    Run the checker again. It should say “Sitemap and canonical found”.

    Check your site
Why this matters and our sources

Two things. A sitemap: a file that lists your pages, found either in your robots.txt or at /sitemap.xml. And a canonical link on the page: a tag in the page’s code that names its main address.

Google’s documentation explains that a canonical link tells search engines which address is the main copy when the same page can be reached in more than one way. A sitemap helps bots find your pages. That is why this check is labelled Strong.

EvidenceStrongWhat the labels mean

Sources, checked 26 Oct 2026

Every copy-paste fix on this page was put on a test page and passed our own checker before it was published.