Off-domain URLs in the sitemap

Addresses in the sitemap that belong to a different domain. Crawlers ignore them.

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A sitemap is expected to list addresses on its own site. Search engines ignore entries on other hosts unless you prove ownership of both in their webmaster tools, so foreign entries are dead weight at best and, at worst, a sign that the sitemap is describing a different site.

How SiteScan counts them. Every <loc> in the sitemap is compared with the scanned host. The host with or without www. counts as the same site; any other domain, and any other subdomain, counts as foreign. When there is at least one, the row appears in amber with their number.

Common causes

• A staging or development domain hard-coded in the CMS settings, so the generator writes staging.example.com or localhost into the live sitemap.
• An old domain after a migration: the site moved, but the sitemap was copied over or cached with the previous name.
• Other subdomains or a CDN host (a blog, a shop, a media host) listed in the main site's sitemap.

How to fix

Correct the site URL in the CMS or the plugin (in WordPress: Settings, General, "Site Address"), clear the sitemap cache and regenerate it. Give each subdomain its own sitemap and declare it in that subdomain's robots.txt. Then run a new scan to confirm the row is gone. See also the sitemap row and canonical URLs.