sitemap.xml Tester

For a site up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB, a single sitemap.xml is enough. Beyond that, you have to split into multiple sitemaps grouped in a sitemap_index.xml. It is also recommended when you segment by type (articles / products / categories) to target the diagnosis in Search Console.

Required: <loc> (absolute URL, encoded). Recommended: <lastmod> (ISO 8601 date, e.g. 2024-03-15 or 2024-03-15T14:30:00+00:00). Optional and largely ignored by Google: <changefreq>, <priority>. Multilingual annotations use the xhtml:link namespace with rel="alternate" for hreflang.

Yes, it's a red flag for Google. A lastmod in the future or suspiciously uniform (every URL at the same timestamp, updated on every crawl) is ignored by the algorithm. Consequence: Google falls back on its own freshness estimate, which is slower. Best practice: lastmod reflects the last actual content modification, not the last sitemap regeneration.

Submitting a sitemap indexes nothing, it is a discovery signal. If the page is not indexed, Google does not deem it worthy (quality, duplicate, inaccessible, robots blocked). The sitemap speeds up crawl but does not bypass the filters. Audit: test URLs one by one via Search Console "Inspect URL" to understand the verdict.