Affilimate uses your sitemap to efficiently scan for affiliate links and monitor when your content has changed.
Standard sitemaps created by plugins like Yoast, RankMath, and so forth are generally supported by Affilimate out of the box. As are sitemaps generated by any popular website builder.
Still, you might see a message like this which indicates your site needs some extra setup:
In this guide, you'll find a list of possible errors and solutions so you can get your scan running properly.
Here are some possible errors you may encounter during the Site Scan, and their solutions:
- Sitemap not found — We could not find a sitemap on your website.
- Scanner blocked by the server — Your host or CDN has blocked our site scanner.
- No new affiliate links found — The scan did not discover any affiliate links on your site.
- Pages with errors inside sitemap — Some pages on your site could not be accessed.
Follow our step-by-step guide to make sure your sitemap is accessible and correctly formatted.
Have a custom-coded sitemap? Check our sitemap technical requirements guide to make sure it's providing the expected information.
Need to track a custom sitemap URL or a sub-sitemap? If your sitemap isn't available under a standard URL, please contact Support using the message icon or via support@affilimate.com.
Step 1. Make sure your sitemap is discoverable
By default, Affilimate will look for your sitemap at common locations such as:
yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xmlyourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xmlyourwebsite.com/index.xml
As well as whether it's denoted inside your
robots.txt file. To resolve this issue, follow this troubleshooting process:
Visit
yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml (replacing "yourwebsite.com" with the domain name of your website).If you're successful, you should see something like this:
The design may vary, and you may see a list of pages on your website instead of a list of sub-sitemaps.
If your sitemap isn't found, enable a sitemap with popular website platforms and CMS systems:
- WordPress
- Enable Sitemaps in Yoast SEO
- Enable Sitemaps in RankMath
- Enable Sitemaps in JetPack
- Enable Sitemaps in The SEO Framework
- For other plugins, google "[plugin name] sitemap" to find instructions
- SquareSpace (enabled by default)
- Enable Sitemaps in SquareSpace (note that sitemaps are not available during trial)
- Wix (enabled by default)
Note: You should only allow one plugin to manage your sitemap at a time. If you ask multiple plugins to create sitemaps, you might experience plugin conflicts.
If your sitemap was previously missing and you've now enabled it, you can now rescan your website.
Go to Affilimate's Scan page, and find your website in the dropdown list:
Push the white button to Scan Website, and attempt to scan your site for affiliate links again. If you see a green Success message, your work is probably done!
Otherwise, continue troubleshooting.
Step 2. Fix sitemap exists, but can't be scanned
If your sitemap is accessible via the browser at a standard URL but Affilimate can't scan it, it's usually that your host, CDN, or plugins are "rate limiting" our access to your website.
Rate limiting means the number of times we can access your website over a given timeframe.To get an idea of the number of requests, Affilimate needs to access (every page on your site) + (every cloaked link on your site) = Total expected requests.
Here are a few ways to increase the rate limits of your site:
- Your host's rate limiting is blocking our crawler
- Solution: Contact your host and ask them about rate limits. Many hosts (such as GoDaddy and Siteground) enforce rate limits, especially for lower level plans.
- If your host has confirmed they are rate-limiting you, please contact us at support@affilimate.com or via the chat and we'll lower your website's crawl speed manually.
- Your CDN's rate limiting is blocking our crawler
- Solution: google "[your CDN] rate limiting"
- Examples:
- Cloudflare traffic control (this is a paid feature)
- You have a security plugin which is blocking our crawler (e.g. through rate limiting)
- Solution: google "[your plugin] rate limiting" and increase the rate limit
- Examples:
If none of these work, please contact Support support@affilimate.com or via the chat with the following information:
- Your website URL
- Your sitemap URL
- Which hosting + CDN you're using
- A list of the plugins on your website, if you are using WordPress (a screenshot is sufficient)
And we'll help you troubleshoot your site scan.
Step 3. Scan didn't find (all) your affiliate links
If the site scan wasn't able to find your affiliate links, or at least not all of them, there are a few possible explanations:
- You and using a custom link cloaker or redirect script
- Solution: Please read our link cloaking guide and get in touch if needed
- You are using an affiliate program or network we haven't added support for your
- Solution: Contact us with some example links
- You are using direct linking
- Solution: Contact us with a list of URLs you're direct linking
But if the scan did find affiliate links, but some of your pages are showing errors, proceed to Step 4.
Step 4. Fix pages with errors inside your sitemap
Usually, this happens if your sitemap contains 404 pages.
This can happen if:
- Your sitemap is cached and you've unpublished an article
- Your sitemap contains incorrectly formatted URLs (try clicking some links in your sitemap to see that they work)
- Your sitemap contains 404 pages
Please fix these issues and then scan your website again.
Sometimes, plugins will block access from crawlers to pages like your Contact page. If you see an error like that, it's not a problem as long as you don't have affiliate links on that page you want to track.
