Sitemap sitemap.xml: Checking and Common Errors
A sitemap is a list of addresses that you consider important. It does not guarantee indexing but speeds up the discovery of pages and helps the bot understand the structure. You can check an existing sitemap with the sitemap.xml analyzer, and generate a new one with the site crawling generator.
What Should Be in a Proper Sitemap
- Only addresses that return a 200 code — without redirects and errors.
- Only canonical versions of pages.
- No addresses that are closed from indexing: this is a contradictory signal.
- Current modification dates, if you specify them.
- No more than 50,000 addresses and 50 MB in one file — otherwise, an index file with links to several sitemaps is needed.
What the Analysis Shows
| Finding | Why This is Bad |
|---|---|
| Addresses with redirects | The bot spends crawling on intermediate addresses |
| Broken addresses | Reduce trust in the sitemap as a whole |
| Pages with noindex | You are simultaneously asking to index and prohibiting |
| Duplicates and different variations of the same address | The bot chooses the canonical itself, and not always as you wanted |
| Sitemap not specified in robots.txt | It has to be searched for manually |
When Multiple Sitemaps are Needed
Large websites find it convenient to break the sitemap down by types of pages: products separately, articles separately, categories separately. Then, in Search Console, coverage for each group is visible, and it is clear which section is poorly indexed. All parts are listed in an index file, which is specified in robots.txt. Such separation is mandatory when there are more than fifty thousand addresses and useful long before this limit.
How to Keep It in Order
- Generate the sitemap automatically, not manually — otherwise, it will become outdated in a month.
- Specify it in robots.txt and add it to Search Console.
- After major changes on the site, recheck it with the analyzer.
- Monitor the coverage report in Search Console: it shows what from the sitemap actually made it into the index.
Related Materials
Checking robots.txt, checking indexing, and the section on page indexing in the dashboard, where they can be sent to Google in bulk.