Short overview
Today, I was casually checking out the Workforge.com website, an e-learning platform. While doing that, intuitionally I always like to check out the Sitemap feature. Without any intention of actually finding some issue, I actually did.
This test was performed on the 4th of February, 2025.
Namely, what I’ve actually noticed is that this company is using an unordinary approach towards sitemaps. I’m aware that some alternative strategies actually work out well. But in this case, I couldn’t really find out the logic behind it.
Steps to reproduce:
- Go to the following page: https://workforge.com/
- Navigate to the bottom of the page, find, and click on the Sitemap button.
- You should land on a blank page with the following URL: https://workforge.b-cdn.net/sitemap_index.xml
We can immediately notice that the page where we land after clicking the sitemap button isn’t the same domain.
After checking out the https://workforge.b-cdn.net/ path, I’ve found out that it is actually a mirrored CDN version of the https://workforge.com/ homepage, with a slight difference that on the CDN version; the links are leading back to the workforge.com domain pages with links updated with tracking parameters. It is probably set up for some testing purposes.
Why is the sitemap page blank?
When I clicked on the sitemap button, I landed on this path: https://workforge.b-cdn.net/sitemap_index.xml with no content, just a blank page.
From my previous experiences, sitemap pages appear like this when served on a CDN version domain. Sitemaps appear blank when viewed in a browser but are not blank for search engines. This happens because the stylesheet needed to display XML source code in a human-readable layout is (in your case, probably after setting up a CDN in one of the performance plugins) hosted on another domain that the sitemap itself. This causes the browser to ignore the stylesheet, leaving a blank result.
Just to confirm that this is the case, I’ve checked if there are sitemaps listed, even though not visible from the front end.
First, I tested it with SEOmator and got confirmation that the sitemap results were listed, although the base domain paths were all related to workforge.com. After that, I tested it with Cypress and received the same results to confirm this.
The primary domain contains a sitemap page as well
I discovered that there is a sitemap page under the primary domain as well. Check it out:
https://workforge.com/sitemap_index.xml
It is opening properly with a nice Yoast SEO style appearance, just as most WordPress sites would do 🙂
The sitemaps listed are exactly the ones listed under the https://workforge.b-cdn.net/sitemap_index.xml path as well.
Let’s conclude what have we found out so far: The CDN is serving an empty sitemap_index.xml, but when a search engine or other tool tries to follow the links within that empty file, it’s correctly redirected to the actual sub-sitemaps on workforge.com. So, the end result is that the correct sitemap information is eventually retrieved, even though the initial sitemap_index.xml is from the CDN.
Conflicting situation
There are 2 sitemap pages with identical content:
- https://workforge.b-cdn.net/sitemap_index.xml
- https://workforge.com/sitemap_index.xml
The first thing that I don’t understand is why is the Sitemap button on the main domain linked to the CDN version sitemap path. The most likely explanation, at least from my perspective, is simply an oversight or a mistake. Someone probably set up the link to the CDN version of the sitemap at some point (perhaps during testing or a previous configuration) and then forgot to update it to the correct version on the main domain.
There is no logical explanation for why the CDN version would work better than the one using the primary domain. Especially since I believe that the https://workforge.b-cdn.net domain isn’t even intended to be crawled, but it will eventually only serve temporary testing purposes.
I mean, let’s not forget the fact that I have so easily discovered the https://workforge.b-cdn.net/ domain, which I believe isn’t meant to be visited by users. Or maybe I’m wrong?
Fixing the blank appearance on the CDN sitemap page
You can eventually do two things:
1. leave it as it is; the search engines do not care about the stylesheet and will read your sitemaps just fine, or…
2. try to find a way for the CDN not to be applied to the sitemap stylesheet. This depends on the possibilities in your CDN plugin. If there is an option to exclude certain file types, then try adding both .xml and .xsl file types there.
