Common Issues with Site Audit and Internals
If you’ve recently hit a snag with either Site Audit or Internals and aren’t seeing results in the toolset, one of two issues is the likely cause:
- Our crawler is getting blocked.
- There is an issue with your sitemap.
Whitelisting Our Crawler
The most common reason for Site Audit or Internals not returning results is that our crawler is getting blocked when trying to access your website. You can allow our crawler to access your website by whitelisting our IP addresses or our agent.
Here are the IP addresses to whitelist:
54.151.33.17
13.56.184.24
54.183.93.118
54.176.79.68
54.151.90.40
54.183.162.6
54.219.164.152
54.183.93.118
Here is the agent to whitelist:
Alpine:github.com/containiq/PositionalBot:v1.0.0
You can contact us directly if you have questions about whitelisting our IP addresses or agents. We can be reached at [email protected]!
Sitemap Issues
If you’ve tried whitelisting our IP addresses or agent, and you’re still getting no results returned to you in Site Audit or Internals, our crawler is likely having trouble accessing your webpages from your sitemap.
By default, the crawler checks your robots.txt file for the location of your sitemap or sitemaps. If it cannot locate your sitemap(s) in robots.txt, it will automatically check some standard locations where your sitemap might exist (for example, yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).
If Positional can’t locate your sitemap(s) using the above methods, or if your sitemap(s) exist in a non-standard location, you’ll need to specify the location of your sitemap(s).
When adding a new domain in Positional, either with the GSC integration or without, you can specify the location of your sitemap(s).
If you’re adding your domain with the GSC integration, click on Advanced and then on Specify Sitemap(s) to specify the location of your sitemaps:
If you’re adding your domain without the GSC integration, click on Specify Sitemap(s) to provide the URL(s) where your sitemap(s) exist:
Moreover, if you’d like Positional to crawl only specific sitemaps and not all of your sitemaps, the sitemap specification feature will limit crawling to only the sitemaps that you’ve provided.
If It Still Isn’t Working
If neither of these solutions fixed the issue, and you still aren’t seeing any results returned, you should contact us at [email protected].
Our team would be happy to investigate and troubleshoot the issue.