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Sitemap checkerSee your sitemap as a search engine does.
Paste the address of an XML sitemap, or just your site's, and see whether it is valid, how many URLs it lists, which child sitemaps fail, and whether its dates and robots.txt help.
What it checks
- That it answers, with XML. An error status, no answer, or an HTML page where the sitemap should be.
- The sitemaps.org rules. A
<urlset>or<sitemapindex>root with its namespace and its closing tag, a<loc>in every entry, no unescaped&, absolute URLs on the sitemap's own site, no duplicates, dates in the W3C format and none in the future, and at most 50,000 URLs per file. Files are read up to 10 MB each. - Sitemap indexes. The first 10 child sitemaps, each checked the same way. Gzipped sitemaps too.
- Whether the dates say anything. No
<lastmod>at all, every URL with the same one, or a newest date over a year old. - Addresses. http:// pages in an https:// sitemap, and a sitemap address that redirects.
- robots.txt. Whether it names the sitemap. Give a site's address and the sitemap is looked for there, then at /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml.
The checker reads robots.txt and the sitemap files as a search engine would, and not the pages they list. Checking those for 404s and server errors, every day, is what Pingpile does for the sites in your Search Console.
Watch it every day
A sitemap that is fine today can break with the next deploy. Pingpile reads it again on a schedule, as often as every 6 hours on the free plan, and emails you when it breaks or drops below the number of URLs you expect. Connect Search Console and it checks a rolling sample of its pages for 404s and server errors too.
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