← work — the registryENG-023unsealed — measured
Small Business Coach Associates
a false flag traced to the apex host
A coaching practice's ranking tool reported the sitemap missing and prescribed three fixes. All three were already switched on. The sitemap was fine. The tool had knocked on the wrong door.
- sector
- US business-coaching practice
- period
- aug 2026
- role
- verification — the tool's advice checked against the server
readouts — measured, sourced
03 on the record · every one names its source
3 / 3
prescribed fixes that would have changed nothing
read from — the tool's report, checked line by line
8 / 8
host × scheme × user-agent combinations landing on the sitemap index, 200
read from — fetch sweep after the change
0
server-level redirects on the apex host before the fix
read from — server config
the file — read in order
01
the symptom
'sitemap.xml not found', with three remedies attached: enable the sitemap, point robots.txt at it, remove whatever was blocking it.
The sitemap toggle was on, robots.txt already named the www sitemap index, and nothing was blocking anything.
02
the finding
The crawler had probed the bare domain. The SEO plugin's sitemap redirect fires only on the canonical host (an exact match on the home URL, defeated by a query string too), and WordPress's own canonical redirect never rescues a path that 404s. So the apex sitemap was a real 404 for anything that started there.
Nothing at the server level canonicalised the host. The only redirect lived inside WordPress, which by then had already given up.
03
the fix
A server-level apex → www 301, placed ahead of the WordPress block so it wins before the application runs; backup kept.
Verified across host × scheme × user agent — eight combinations, every one landing on the sitemap index with a 200. The three prescribed fixes stayed untouched, because none of them was the problem.
provenance
- surfaces touched
- server config · sitemap index · robots.txt · the tool's report
- numbers read from
- fetch sweeps · server config · plugin source
- tags
- diagnosis · canonical host · sitemaps
unsealed by the client. every readout above was read at source at the time; nothing is quoted from memory.
the registry
previous file · ENG-021
Trade2Sync
migration rescue — the collapse that pre-dated the migration
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next file · ENG-013
UK tile retailer
performance rescue — 2.2 s → 47 ms
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the same hands
The person who diagnosed this file is the person who ships the fix. Two plain sentences beat a brief.