XML Sitemap Validator
Validate your XML sitemap for syntax errors, invalid URLs, incorrect date formats, and other issues that could prevent search engines from properly indexing your site.
How to Use This Tool
- Get your sitemap content - Visit your sitemap URL (usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) and copy the entire XML content.
- Paste and validate - Paste the XML content into the text area above and click Validate.
- Review the results - Check for errors (red) that must be fixed, warnings (yellow) that should be reviewed, and informational notes (blue).
- Fix issues - Address any errors in your sitemap file, especially invalid URLs, incorrect date formats, or missing required elements.
- Resubmit to search engines - After fixing issues, resubmit your sitemap through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
Why Validating Your Sitemap Matters
An XML sitemap is your direct communication channel with search engines, telling them which pages to crawl and how important they are. A malformed sitemap can cause search engines to miss important content or waste crawl budget on irrelevant pages.
- Ensure proper indexing: Invalid XML syntax can cause search engines to completely ignore your sitemap, leaving your pages undiscovered.
- Validate all URLs: Broken or malformed URLs in your sitemap waste crawl budget and can lead to indexing errors.
- Check date formats: Incorrect lastmod dates confuse search engines about when your content was actually updated.
- Verify sitemap limits: Sitemaps have a 50MB size limit and 50,000 URL limit - exceeding these means search engines will ignore entries.
- Debug indexing issues: If pages aren't appearing in search results, a sitemap error might be the cause.
Understanding Sitemap Elements
The full URL of the page. Must be an absolute URL starting with http:// or https://. This is the only required element.
When the page was last modified. Use ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ.
How often the page changes: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or never. Google largely ignores this.
Relative importance from 0.0 to 1.0. Only affects crawl priority within your own site, not against other sites.
Frequently Asked Questions
A sitemap (urlset) contains individual page URLs. A sitemap index (sitemapindex) contains references to multiple sitemap files. Use a sitemap index when you have more than 50,000 URLs or your sitemap exceeds 50MB - split your URLs across multiple sitemaps and reference them from the index.
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