Sitemap.xml files are an efficient way of informing Google and other search engines about the most important pages and content within your site and the relation between them. Once you’ve created and submitted your sitemap to Google via GSC, sometimes Google may encounter a range of issues and errors which prevents it from fetching and processing the file. Use the guide below to troubleshoot and resolve your sitemap errors.
- Sitemap fetch errors
- Sitemap parsing errors
- URLs not accessible
- URLs not followed
- URL not allowed
- Compression error
- Empty sitemap
- Sitemap file size error: Your sitemap exceeds the maximum file size limit
- Invalid attribute value
- Invalid date
- Invalid tag value
- Invalid URL
- Invalid URL in sitemap index file: incomplete URL
- Invalid XML: too many tags
- Missing XML attribute
- Missing XML tag
- Missing thumbnail URL
- Missing video title
- Incorrect sitemap index format: Nested sitemap indexes
- Parsing error
- Temporary error
- Too many sitemaps
- Too many URLs
- Unsupported format
- Thumbnail too large
- Path mismatch: Missing www
- Path mismatch: Includes www
- Incorrect namespace
- Leading whitespace
- HTTP error [specific code]
- General HTTP error
- Thumbnail too small
- Video location and play page location are the same
- Video location URL appears to be a play page URL
- Too many News URLs
- Missing <publication> tag
- Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt
- Summary
Sitemap fetch errors
If your sitemap cannot be fetched, Google is not able to process it and access any URLs within it.
sitemap.xml has been blocked by your robots.txt file
Google couldn’t retrieve the sitemap.xml because by respecting the robots.txt file and its rules Google was not allowed to crawl the page.
Recommendation
Remove the rule preventing Google from crawling your sitemap.xml URL. You can use a robots.txt validating & testing tool to test your changes before implementation.
Your site has manual action
If your site has an unresolved manual action, Google won’t read your sitemap.
Recommendation
Confirm, if the site has been affected by a manual action, by navigating to Google Search Console > Security & Manual Actions > Manual Actions report
If your site has a manual action issued against it, fix the manual action and resend your sitemap. Monitor the sitemap status.
The URL provided for the sitemap is wrong
If your sitemap.xml URL returns a HTTP 404 error, Google is not able to fetch it.
Recommendation
Paste the sitemap URL in your browser to verify if it exist. If the URL returns a 404 error, resolve it and submit your sitemap to Google.
Some other general error
Sometimes other errors can stop Google from fetching your sitemap, e.g. server unavailability.
Recommendation
Monitor the issue to verify if it persists in any later crawl attempts.
Sitemap parsing errors
Google fetched your sitemap but it encountered errors when processing it:
URLs not accessible
When Google attempted to crawl a URL within your sitemap it encountered an error.
Recommendation
Use the URL inspection tool within GSC to inspect the URL to establish if Google can access it.
URLs not followed
Google couldn’t crawl all the URLs within the sitemap potentially due to too many redirects implemented or relative URLs.
Recommendation
Replace any redirect URLs in your sitemap with the final URL. You can use a crawler, e.g. Screaming Frog to extract redirected URLs in bulk. Make it best practice not to include redirected URLs in your sitemap to avoid similar issues in the future. Additionally, use permanent redirects if you are redirecting one page to another and avoid using JavaScript or meta-refresh redirects. If your URL could not be processed because you used a relative URL in your sitemap, replace them with an absolute URL, and resubmit it to Google.
URL not allowed
Your sitemap includes URLs which are at a higher level or different domain than the sitemap file itself.
Recommendation
Make sure that your sitemap includes URLs within the same domain, for example: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml includes only https://yourdomain.com/page-example URLs and does not include:
- https://www.yourdomain.com/page-example (includes www)
- http://www.yourdomain.com/page-example (uses http instead of https)
- www.yourdomain.com/page-example (missing https)
Compression error
Google couldn’t uncompress your compressed sitemap file (for example .gzip).
Recommendation
Recompress your sitemap, upload it to your site and resubmit it via GSC.
Empty sitemap
Your sitemap does not contain any URLs.
Recommendation
Check if your sitemap is empty. Recreate it and resubmit it via GSC.
Sitemap file size error: Your sitemap exceeds the maximum file size limit
Your uncompressed sitemap exceeds the recommended 50MB.
Recommendation
Break your sitemap into smaller sitemap, list them in a sitemap index file and submit the sitemap index file(s) to Google via GSC.
Invalid attribute value
An assigned value to an XML tag attribute is invalid. Follow sitemap XML best practices outlined in sitemaps documentation.
Recommendation
Review your sitemap to make sure that only allowed attributed are present, and that only allowed values have been assigned to them. Review and rectify your attributes and values for any typos.
Invalid date
Submitted sitemap contains one or more invalid dates. This error is usually caused either by
- a date in the incorrect format,
- the date itself is not valid
Recommendation
Make sure your date use the W3C Datetime encoding, although the time reference is not required, and that your dates match one of the following W3C Datetime formats:
- 2005-02-21
- 2005-02-21T18:00:15+00:00
If you specify time, although not required, you must also specify a time zone.
Invalid tag value
The submitted sitemap file contains one or more tag with an invalid value.
Recommendation
Review the specifications for your sitemap type, review tagged values, correct errors, and resubmit it via GSC.
Invalid URL
A URL included in the sitemap is not valid because it contains:
- unsupported characters
- spaces
- other characters, e.g. quotes
- or is incorrectly formatted
Recommendation
Review your URLs and make sure that they are encoded for readability and escaped properly. Review URLs for any incorrect characters (you can use a crawler to audit URLs in bulk), rectify issues, and resubmit it via GSC.
Invalid URL in sitemap index file: incomplete URL
The submitted sitemap index file does not include the full URL for each listed sitemap file.
Recommendation
Update your sitemap index file to include the complete path to each listed sitemap file, and resubmit via GSC.
Invalid XML: too many tags
The sitemap that was submitted contains duplicate tags, e.g.
- <loc> </loc> tag
- <lastmod> </lastmod> tag
within a parent XML tag.
Recommendation
Remove the duplicate tag and resubmit your sitemap.
Missing XML attribute
A tag in your sitemap is missing a required attribute.
Recommendation
Review your sitemaps to make sure that all required attributes are present. A basic sitemap should include:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/page.html</loc>
<lastmod>2023-06-04</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>Once you have fixed the attribute values, resubmit your sitemap.
Missing XML tag
One or more entries in your sitemap is missing a required tag.
Recommendation
Check the sitemap documentation to review required tags and cross reference it with your sitemap. Add required tag
Missing thumbnail URL
One or more of video entries is missing a URL to a thumbnail image.
Recommendation
Specify the location of any thumbnail URLs using the “><video:thumbnail_loc> tag. Resubmit the sitemap to GSC.
Missing video title
One or more video entries is missing a title.
Recommendation
Specify the title of each video in your sitemap in the “><video:title> tag.
Incorrect sitemap index format: Nested sitemap indexes
One or more entries in your sitemap index file uses its own URL or the URL of another sitemap index file. A sitemap index file cannot list other sitemap index files, only sitemap files.
Recommendation
Remove any entries pointing to sitemap index files, and resubmit your sitemap.
Parsing error
Google could not parse the sitemap’s XML. This error is usually caused by an unescaped character in the URL. Any data values (including URLs) within the XML file must use entity escape codes for certain characters such as & ‘ ” < > symbols.
Recommendation
Use the sitemaps guidelines to escape your URLs properly, and resubmit your sitemap.
Temporary error
Our system experienced a temporary problem that prevented us from processing your sitemap.
Recommendation
Usually, Google is able to process your sitemap at a later date. Monitor the issue, and if it persists after several hours, resubmit your sitemap.
Too many sitemaps
Your sitemap index file lists more than 50,000 sitemaps.
Recommendation
Split your sitemap index into multiple sitemap index files and make sure that each lists no more than 50,000 sitemaps.
Too many URLs
Your sitemap lists more than 50,000 URLs. According to Google Search Central sitemap documentation, a single sitemap should contain up to 50,000 URLs.
Recommendation
Split your sitemap into multiple sitemaps and ensure that each contains no more than 50,000 URLs. You can also use a sitemap index file to manage your sitemaps.
Unsupported format
Your submitted sitemap is not in a supported format. The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.
Recommendation
Follow the recommended format when recreating the sitemap.
Path mismatch: Missing www
The path to your sitemap does not contain the www prefix but the URLs it lists do.
Recommendation
Remove “www” from all the URLs to match your sitemap location.
Path mismatch: Includes www
The path to your sitemap contains the www prefix, but the URLs it contains do not.
Recommendation
Add “www” to all the URLs to match your sitemap location.
Incorrect namespace
The root element of your sitemap:
- doesn’t contain the correct namespace,
- the namespace is declared incorrectly,
- it has a typo or incorrect URL.
Recommendation
Use the correct namespace for your file type, e.g. a sitemap file, a video sitemap, a sitemap index file, an image sitemap, a news sitemap.
Leading whitespace
Your sitemap begins with leading whitespace, rather than a namespace declaration. XML files should begin with the XML declaration that specifies the version of XML being used.
Recommendation
Google is still able to process your sitemap, but you might want to remove the whitespace so that the file adheres to the XML standard and to remove this error from GSC.
HTTP error [specific code]
Google encountered a 400-level HTTP error when when attempting to download your sitemap. This message displays the status code we received (for example, 404).
Recommendation
Make sure that the specified sitemap URL is correct and that the sitemap exists at that location. Then, resubmit your sitemap.
General HTTP error
Google encountered another HTTP error not covered by a more specific error listed.
Recommendation
Expand the details to see what kind of error occurred. This can also be caused by a 404 (page not present) error, which is a fetch error.
Thumbnail too large
The video thumbnail image specified in your sitemap is too large.
Recommendation
Resize your video thumbnail image to 160 x 120 px. Update your sitemap with the new information, and then resubmit it.
Thumbnail too small
A video thumbnail image specified in your sitemap is too small.
Recommendation
Resize your video thumbnail image to 160 x 120 px. Update your sitemap if necessary.
Video location and play page location are the same
In a video sitemap, the video content URL and the player URL are the same and result in this error.
Recommendation
Provide different URLs for "><video:player_loc> and <video:content_loc>, if you are using both tags.
Video location URL appears to be a play page URL
In a video sitemap, the <video:content_loc> URL points to the page hosting the player.
Recommendation
Update the <video:content_loc> tag to contain the URL of the actual video media file.
Too many News URLs
Your sitemap contains more than 1,000 URLs.
Recommendation
Make sure to include less than 1,000 URLs in your sitemap. You can control the number of URLs by:
- removing URLs from the sitemap file, or
- by removing the <news:news> metadata from the older URLs.
Missing <publication> tag
Each URL in a News sitemap must contain a <publication> tag.
Recommendation
Make sure each URL within your News sitemap contains a <publication> tag. Resubmit to GSC.
Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt
Google cannot access your sitemap, or can’t access all the content listed in your sitemap, because it is blocked by a robots.txt file.
Recommendation
Use the URL Inspection tool to identify which file is being blocked. Modify your robots.txt file to allow Googlebot to access it.
Summary
If you follow the best SEO practices when creating or modifying your sitemap, you should not encounter many issues and errors in your GSC. Reach out, if you need help optimising your sitemap or resolving sitemap issues.
