I recently came across Xsolla.com, a gaming company, in my LinkedIn suggestions. I checked out their LinkedIn page first, then decided to take a look at their website. It’s really well put together and has a sleek, professional vibe, which shows they keep it updated. Any problems are probably hard to spot right away because of how polished it looks. Still, I wouldn’t be me if I wouldn’t try to find at least one significant issue hahaha! So I did!
The test case I present here was made on 5th of January 2025.
Cypress test:
I have set up a Cypress test for the index sitemap page, as well as for several of the pages listed within it. It would be over too time consuming if I would check each path manually since there is plenty of pages used on the website.
You may check out the scripts I’ve used for testing here: https://github.com/NoToolsNoCraft/Xsolla.com-Sitemap-Test-with-Cypress/tree/main/cypress/e2e
After running successfully, Cypress has found the following issue:
The issue is that one of the pages listed on the index sitemap page doesn’t work properly. This requires taking a deeper look at the index sitemap page.
Reproducing the issue:
On the index sitemap page (path: https://xsolla.com/sitemap.xml) we can see an obvious issue: The same path is listed twice. In addition to that, when we try to open that path (https://xsolla.com/sitemap/pages.xml) it results in a 404 error, indicating the page does not exist.
Check out the screenshot below:
What are the implication of this error?
Broken Links: When a link takes you to a page that doesn’t exist (like https://xsolla.com/sitemap/pages.xml giving a 404 error), it indicates an issue with the sitemap. Search engines might ding websites for having these broken links in their sitemaps since it can hurt user experience and the site’s overall trustworthiness. This directly negatively affects the Search Engine Optimization.
Having the same URL listed multiple times in the same or even in multiple sitemaps generally isn’t a good practice. Search engines can end up crawling the same content over and over, which wastes resources and might slow down how quickly they index things. This can result in a lot of unnecessary work.
What is the resolution?
In short terms, the page should be either re-published in a proper way so that it opens correctly without responding as 404, or it should be removed from the sitemap.
