Sitemap 404 Error

[Tina Larzelere]

Usethe 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.

Hi! So i am submiting sitemap.xml in search console from google and it gives me an error. What should I do to fix the date. I havechecked my calendar on the website and it seems fine. What should I do? What is actually wrong with date format?

Find my contributions useful? Please like, upvote, mark my answer as the best ( solution ), and see my profile. Thanks for your support! I am a Squarespace ( and other technological things ) consultant open for new projects.

As to how to fix the date? It's not like a Store/Product page has a date you can set like you can with some other elements of a SS site. It appears this bad date format is common to v7.1 sites. I just looked at the site map for a test v7.1 site and it too has the bad dates. However my test v7.0 site the dates are good.

Also, earlier on in this article, we mentioned that the sitemap size should be less than 50 MB when uncompressed, but it is a common practice to compress sitemaps to save bandwidth. A commonly used tool for this purpose is gzip, which adds the gz extension to sitemaps. If you get a compression error in the Google Search Console report, this means something went wrong during the compression process. Your best bet is to try again.

There are also several video-sitemap-specific errors: Thumbnail too large/small, Video location and play page location are the same, Video location URL appears to be a play page URL. Find more details on these errors here.

To ensure the accuracy and proper structure of your XML sitemaps, you must know how to prevent syntax errors and common sitemap mistakes. One of the most convenient ways to accomplish this is by using XML sitemap validators like this one. Tools like these will generate a comprehensive report, highlight problematic sections or lines of code, and provide you with valuable insights on how to fix common sitemap errors.

Once you have fixed all sitemap errors mentioned in your GSC report, resubmit your updated sitemap, and notify Google by pinging the updated sitemap URL. Send a GET request to the following address in your browser or using the command line, specifying the full URL of the sitemap:

To access this feature, navigate to the Page Indexing report in Google Search Console, select the Sitemap filter, and then choose the desired category or sitemap you want to examine. This is where you can view the following reports:

To resolve the non-indexed pages issue, remove noindex and non-canonical pages from your sitemap. Alternatively, if the pages were marked as noindex and non-canonical by mistake, fix the wrong tag issues to enable proper indexing.

Creating a sitemap is easy, thanks to the wide variety of sitemap-generating tools out there on the market. Still, if you simply settle on any random tool and then ignore site-mapping best practices, you might end up submitting loads of low-quality pages to Google via your sitemap.

Can you please tell more about the issue, how you have implemented the feature as the theme does not have a sitemap.xml feature. Let us know the plugins or code you have used for it so that we can investigate on it.

In some host, this comes out of the box. For example, my local dev site outputs the spaces above the doctype but this does not happen in my online dev site because the host removes new line spaces out of the box.

Hi @sandeepbali

I am another user which had this issue for a long time, this problem, whichever reason it comes from, can be solved by the plugin in charge of building the xml that should be executing some cleanings before building it.

Thanks for the informative response. I tried using various various HTML Minify plugins, including Fast Velocity Minify as recommended by you, and it is able to remove empty line breaks above the html doctype declaration, but it is still leaving behind some empty white space just before the Doctype.

@sandeepbali, regretfully, I have no more suggestions. I tried Autoptimize to minify the HTML and it eliminated all whitespace above the Doctype. That is my personal test though. Investigating minification in site would be outside the scope of our support.

Please try recreating your site in a development server and test other solutions. This is also a good opportunity to test if Pro is the root cause of the issue. You can do that by deactivating all third party plugins except your sitemap plugin and using the parent Pro theme and check if the issue persists.

The sitemap 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

If that does not solve, you might need to add a custom code to your rank-math.php file from the theme files. To add custom code, we have a dedicated knowledgebase article on how to add a filter/ hook to your site.

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