Sitemap Validator Google

[Irati Klute]

Thesitemap of my company's brand's website seems to be fine when I look at it at first glance. I don't particularly see any errors as such. However, SEMrush, the SEO tool, reports that our sitemap is not in the correct format. SEMrush doesn't tell me what's wrong. It just says that the format is incorrect.

Make sure none of your values are blank. I troubleshooted this for a while and realized my "last edit date" field for certain entries was blank and thus it was causing markup errors in the XML file due to nothing populating for certain URLs

For the following header I get the same two errors on all my sitemaps. It's confusing because, if Google can't read my sitemap, then how can they say that each URL has the same priority? The header counts as line 2, after the XML declaration. Google claims only to have indexed about 2% of the URLs from the maps. Please help.

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.

Deleting a sitemap removes the sitemap from this report, but Google won't forget the sitemap or any URLs listed in it. If you want Google to stop visiting the URLs listed in a sitemap you will need to use a robots.txt rule.

If a sitemap fetch or parse fails, Google will continue trying to fetch and process the sitemap for a few days. If the attempts continue to fail, Google will stop trying to crawl that URL. Issues affecting individual URLs within a sitemap won't prevent Google from continuing to read the sitemap, as long as the sitemap can be fetched and read in general.

Different domain: Check that the URLs all begin with the same domain as your sitemap location. For instance, if your sitemap is at , the following URLs are not valid for that sitemap:

Your sitemap is larger than 50MB when uncompressed. If your sitemap is larger than the limit, break it into several smaller sitemaps and list these in a sitemap index file and submit the sitemap index file(s).

You assigned an invalid value to an XML tag attribute. Check your sitemap to make sure that only the allowed attributes are present, and that you assign only allowed values according to the sitemap specifications. Check your attributes and values for typos.

Your sitemap contains one or more invalid dates. This error could be because a date is in the incorrect format, or the date itself is not valid. Dates must use W3C Datetime encoding, although you can omit the time portion. Make sure your dates match one of the following W3C Datetime formats:

A URL in your sitemap is not valid. This error might be because it contains unsupported characters, spaces, or other characters such as quotes, or it might be incorrectly formatted (for example, htp:// instead of ).

Make sure that the URLs listed in your sitemap are encoded for readability and escaped properly. Check for any incorrect characters such as spaces or quotes. You also try copying the URL into a browser to see if the browser can understand the URL and load the page.

Your sitemap index file doesn't include the full URL for each sitemap file that it lists. When we see a sitemap index file, we look in the same directory for the files that it references. For instance, if your sitemap index file is _index.xml and lists a sitemap as sitemap.xml (no / at the beginning), then we'll look for that sitemap at If we can't find it there, you'll see this error.

Often, this problem is caused by an unescaped character in the URL. As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for certain characters such as & ' " symbols. Be sure that your URLs are properly escaped.

Our system experienced a temporary problem that prevented us from processing your sitemap. Generally, when you receive this error, you do not need to resubmit your sitemap. Google can try to retrieve your sitemap again later. If the error still exists after several hours, try resubmitting your sitemap.

Your sitemap lists more than 50,000 URLs. 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.

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). Make sure that the sitemap URL you specified is correct and that the sitemap exists at that location. Then, resubmit your sitemap.

Google encountered another HTTP error not covered by a more specific error listed here. 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.

The video thumbnail image specified in your sitemap is too large. Resize your video thumbnail image to 160 x 120 px. Update your sitemap with the new information, and then resubmit it. More information about adding video information to a sitemap.

A video thumbnail image specified in your sitemap is too small. Resize your video thumbnail image to 160 x 120 px. Update your sitemap if necessary. More information about adding video information to a sitemap.

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. Use the URL Inspection tool to confirm which file is being blocked, and modify your robots.txt file to allow Googlebot to access it.

I do SEO and one of the things is to make sure customer sitemap is valid. I found few online validators but the one I really liked is I just want to know if anyone has used this online tool or recommends another one?

I know google does check but one of the SEO items we do is to validate sitemaps and if URLs are search engine friendly.

XML sitemaps are the most versatile of the sitemaps formats. It's extensible and can be used to supply additional data about images, video, and news content, as well as the localized versions of your pages.

Sitemap size limits: All formats limit a single sitemap to 50MB (uncompressed) or 50,000 URLs. If you have a larger file or more URLs, you must break your sitemap into multiple sitemaps. You can optionally create a sitemap index file and submit that single index file to Google. You can submit multiple sitemaps and sitemap index files to Google. This may be useful if you want to track the search performance of each individual sitemap in Search Console.

Sitemap file encoding and location: The sitemap file must be UTF-8 encoded. You can host your sitemaps anywhere on your site, but unless you submit your sitemap through Search Console, a sitemap affects only descendants of the parent directory. Therefore, a sitemap posted at the site root can affect all files on the site, which is where we recommend posting your sitemaps.

Referenced URLs' properties: Use fully-qualified, absolute URLs in your sitemaps. Google will attempt to crawl your URLs exactly as listed. For example, if your site is at , don't specify a URL such as /mypage.html (a relative URL), use the complete, absolute URL:

Include the URLs in your sitemap that you want to see in Google's search results. Google generally shows the canonical URLs in its search results, which you can influence with sitemaps. If you have different URLs for mobile and desktop versions of a page, we recommend pointing to only one version in a sitemap. However, if you want to point to both URLs, annotate your URLs to indicate the desktop and mobile versions.

If you only want to provide web page URLs, you can create a common text file that contains one URL per line and submit that to Google. For example, if you have two pages on your site, you could add them to your text sitemap located at as follows:

When creating a sitemap, you're telling search engines about which URLs you prefer to show in search results. These are the canonical URLs. If you have the same content accessible under different URLs, choose the URL you prefer and include that in the sitemap instead of all URLs that lead to the same content.

If you're using a CMS such as WordPress, Wix, or Blogger, it's likely that your CMS has already made a sitemap available to search engines. Try searching for information about how your CMS generates sitemaps, or how to create a sitemap if your CMS doesn't generate a sitemap automatically. For example, in case of Wix, search for "wix sitemap", or in case of Blogger, search for "Blogger RSS".

For sitemaps with less than a few dozen URLs, you may be able to manually create a sitemap. For this, open a text editor such as Windows Notepad or Nano (Linux, MacOS), and follow a syntax described in the Sitemap Formats section. You can name the file anything you like as long as the characters are allowed in a URL.

For sitemaps with more than a few dozen URLs, you will need to generate the sitemap. There are various tools that can generate a sitemap. However, the best way is to have your website software generate it for you. For example, you can extract your site's URLs from your website's database and then export the URLs to either the screen or actual file on your web server. Talk to your developers or server manager about this solution. If you need inspiration for the code, check out our old, unmaintained collection of third-party sitemap generators.

You don't have to worry about the order of the URLs in your sitemap, it doesn't matter to Google. Note the size requirements for sitemaps; if the sitemap becomes too large, you must split it into smaller sitemaps. Learn more about managing large sitemaps.

Keep in mind that submitting a sitemap is merely a hint: it doesn't guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on the site. There are a few different ways to make your sitemap available to Google.

If you have multiple websites, you can simplify the submission process by creating one or more sitemaps that include URLs for all your verified sites, and saving the sitemaps to a single location. You can choose to use:

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