Wrong domains and outdated addresses
Symptom: a production sitemap contains staging.example.com or old HTTP addresses. Check your configured public base URL and regenerate the file. Use the intended final host and protocol consistently.
Example: if http://example.com/about redirects to https://example.com/about, publish the HTTPS destination in the current sitemap. Update internal links too, so the next crawl discovers the preferred address.
Redirects, missing pages and server errors
Open a suspicious entry and inspect its HTTP response. A 301 or 308 is a permanent redirect; a 404 indicates a missing resource; 5xx means a server-side failure. A page that displays an error message with status 200 can still be unsuitable.
- Replace redirected entries with their final, relevant destinations.
- Remove permanently deleted pages without replacements; do not redirect everything to the homepage.
- Investigate temporary server failures before excluding valuable content.
The generator reports some fetch errors, but it is not a complete HTTP or indexing audit.
Invalid XML or the wrong response
A sitemap URL can accidentally serve an HTML login page, a platform error or the website homepage. Check the response body as well as the status code. An XML parsing error is different from a browser saying that XML has no style information.
Common editing mistakes include a missing closing tag and an unescaped ampersand. In XML, write ?type=guide&page=2 rather than a raw ampersand. Compare the structure with our working examples.
Conflicting indexing signals
A sitemap entry cannot override a noindex directive. Blocking crawling in robots.txt is also different from requesting exclusion from an index. Review the page response, robot directives and preferred canonical address together.
If a product page declares another URL as canonical, decide which address should represent that content and align your links and sitemap with that choice. This tool does not inspect canonical tags or apply robots.txt rules.
A repeatable repair workflow
- Record a failing URL and the observed response.
- Fix the source: content, routing, redirects or metadata.
- Regenerate and review the sitemap.
- Publish it and check the public file again.
- Monitor your search engine reporting tools; discovery and indexing take time.
Sources and further reading
Reviewed 2 November 2026. Platform behaviour can change; consult the linked documentation for your setup.