Sitemap Status

What is a sitemap? 

A sitemap is a file on your site that tells Google which pages on your site we should know about.

Do I need Sitemaps report?

If you’re using a web hosting service such as Squarespace or Wix, they might generate a sitemap for you, in which case you don’t need to use sitemaps or this report. Search your hosting provider for information about sitemaps.

If you have a small site (fewer than 100 pages) and you can reach any page on your site by following one or more links from your homepage, you don’t need to use sitemaps or this report. In that case, simply request indexing of your homepage (unless you’re using a web hosting service, as mentioned previously, in which case you don’t need to do anything at all).

Managing sitemaps

• Submit a sitemap. “Submitting” a sitemap means telling Google where to find it on your site. You cannot actually upload a sitemap to Google. 

To submit a new sitemap for crawling:

1. You must have owner permissions for a property in order to submit a sitemap using the Sitemaps report. If you don’t have owner permissions, you can instead reference it from your robots.txt file.

Note that the report can show a maximum of 1,000 submitted sitemaps. You may submit more, but only 1,000 can be shown here (which are not shown in order of submission). There currently isn’t any way to see the excess sitemaps in Search Console.

2. Post the sitemap on your site.

The sitemap must use one of the acceptable sitemap formats. Follow the sitemap guidelines for syntax, file location, and so on. We recommend putting a sitemap at your site root, but if using a site hosting service (such as Blogger, Wix, or GoDaddy) you should read your service’s documentation to learn where and how to post your sitemap (or if it’s even necessary).

The sitemap must be accessible to Googlebot, and must not be blocked by any login requirements. You can test if the sitemap is accessible to Googlebot by seeing if you can browse to the sitemap URL in incognito mode.

3. Open the Sitemaps report.
4. Enter the relative URL to the sitemap in the Sitemaps report and click Submit.

• Resubmit a sitemap. You shouldn’t need to resubmit a sitemap that we already know about, even if you’ve changed it. Google will notice any changes the next time we crawl your site.
• Delete a sitemap. Deleting a sitemap removes it from this report, but doesn’t make Google forget the sitemap or any URLs listed on it. If you truly need Google to stop visiting the URLs listed in a sitemap you will need to use a robots.txt rule.

Reading the report

Use the Sitemaps report to tell Google about any new sitemaps for your property, to see your sitemap submission history, and to see any errors that Google encountered when parsing your submitted sitemaps.

• Sitemaps report shows only sitemaps that you submitted using this report or the API. It does not show any sitemaps discovered through a robots.txt reference or other discovery methods. However, even if we already discovered a sitemap through other means, you can still submit it using this report in order to track our success and error rates.
• The report shows only sitemaps that are in the current property.
• You can submit image, video, or news URLs in your sitemap. However, the report doesn’t currently show any data for those types of URLs. 

The following information is shown for each sitemap:

Sitemap URL: The URL where the sitemap is posted, relative to the property root.

Type: The type of sitemap.

 Possible values:

• Sitemap: Sitemap in XML or text format.
• Sitemap index: A sitemap of sitemaps.
• RSS: Sitemap in RSS feed format.
• Atom: Sitemap in Atom feed format.
• Unknown: The submitted file is not a known sitemap type or the sitemap hasn’t been processed yet.

Submitted: The date when the sitemap was last submitted to Google using this report.

Last read: The last time the sitemap was processed by Google.

Status: Status of the submit or crawl. 

Possible values:

• Success: The sitemap was loaded and processed successfully with no errors. All URLs will be queued for crawling.
• Has errors: The sitemap could be parsed but has one or more errors; any URLs that could be parsed from the sitemap will be queued for crawling. Click the sitemap in the table to see the list of errors. See full error descriptions below.
• Couldn’t fetch: The sitemap could not be fetched for some reason. To learn why not, run a live test on the sitemap with the URL Inspection tool:
  • Specify the complete path to your sitemap by copying the path prefix from “Add a new sitemap” and add the submitted sitemap’s relative path, for example: https://example.com/sitemaps/mobile/sitemap.txt. Use the values copied from the report in order to guarantee that you are testing the same URL that Google is using.
  • Click Live test in the URL Inspection tool. This should give you information about whether the sitemap exists and can be fetched by Google.

Discovered URLs: The number of URLs listed in the sitemap. If this is a sitemap index, the number is the count of all URLs in all child sitemaps. Duplicate URLs are counted only once.

Opens a report showing the index coverage of all URLs in this sitemap. For a sitemap index, it includes all URLs listed in any child sitemaps.

Here are a few reasons that your sitemap might be not listed in the report:

• It lives in another property. Sitemaps associated with one property won’t be visible in another property. Thus, sitemaps that you’ve submitted for the site http://example.com won’t be visible in the Sitemaps report for http://m.example.com. or https://example.com. To address this issue, make sure that you’ve added all versions of your site.
• You didn’t submit the sitemap using this report. Only sitemaps submitted using this report are listed; sitemaps found or submitted using other methods won’t be shown, even if Google can find and use them.

Sitemap errors

The following errors are reported by the sitemaps report.

1. URLs not accessible
2. URLs not followed
3. URL not allowed
4. Compression error
5. Empty sitemap
6. Sitemap file size error: Your sitemap exceeds the maximum file size limit.
7. Invalid attribute value
8. Invalid date
9. Invalid tag value
10. Invalid URL
11. Invalid URL in sitemap index file: incomplete URL
12. Invalid XML: too many tags
13. Missing XML attribute
14. Missing XML tag
15. Missing thumbnail URL
16. Missing video title
17. Incorrect sitemap index format: Nested sitemap indexes
18. Parsing error
19. Temporary error
20. Too many sitemaps in sitemap index file
21. Too many URLs in sitemap
22. Unsupported format
23. Path mismatch: Missing www
24. Path mismatch: Includes www
25. Incorrect namespace
26. Leading whitespace
27. HTTP error [specific code]
28. Thumbnail too large
29. Thumbnail too small
30. Video location and play page location are the same
31. Video location URL appears to be a play page URL
32. Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt