Resources & Guides

❌ Including URLs That Return Errors

The Mistake: Including URLs that return 404, 500, or other error codes.

Why It's Bad: Search engines waste crawl budget on broken pages and may lose trust in your sitemap.

The Fix: Test all URLs before adding them to your sitemap. Use our sitemap validator to check for errors.

❌ Including Blocked or Noindex Pages

The Mistake: Adding URLs that are blocked by robots.txt or have noindex meta tags.

Why It's Bad: Sends mixed signals to search engines - you're telling them to index and not index at the same time.

The Fix: Only include URLs that you want indexed and that aren't blocked by robots.txt or noindex directives.

❌ Using Relative URLs Instead of Absolute

The Mistake: Using relative URLs like "/about" instead of "https://www.example.com/about"

Why It's Bad: Violates the sitemap protocol specification and may cause crawl errors.

The Fix: Always use complete, absolute URLs with protocol (https://) and domain name. SitemapStudio automatically validates URL format.

❌ Exceeding Size or URL Limits

The Mistake: Creating sitemaps with more than 50,000 URLs or larger than 50MB uncompressed.

Why It's Bad: Search engines won't process sitemaps that exceed protocol limits.

The Fix: Split large sitemaps into multiple files and create a sitemap index. Use our sitemap splitter tool to automate this process.

❌ Including Redirect URLs

The Mistake: Adding URLs that redirect (301/302) to other pages.

Why It's Bad: Wastes crawl budget and may dilute link equity. Search engines prefer direct links to final destinations.

The Fix: Only include the final destination URLs, not the redirects. Update your sitemap when you implement redirects.

❌ Never Updating Your Sitemap

The Mistake: Creating a sitemap once and never updating it as your site grows.

Why It's Bad: New pages won't be discovered quickly, and old pages that no longer exist will cause crawl errors.

The Fix: Update your sitemap whenever you add, remove, or significantly modify pages. Use our history feature to track sitemap versions and changes. For tracking your overall site performance, consider using RankTrackerPro to monitor your indexing and ranking progress.

❌ Including All Pages Indiscriminately

The Mistake: Adding every single page on your site, including low-value pages like pagination, filters, or duplicate content.

Why It's Bad: Dilutes the importance of your truly valuable pages and wastes crawl budget.

The Fix: Be selective. Only include pages with unique, valuable content that you want indexed. Use the priority tag to signal relative importance.

❌ Using Incorrect Encoding

The Mistake: Not properly escaping special characters in URLs (like &, ', ", <, >).

Why It's Bad: Can cause XML parsing errors and prevent the sitemap from being processed.

The Fix: Use proper XML entity encoding. SitemapStudio automatically handles character escaping for you:

• & becomes &amp;
• ' becomes &apos;
• " becomes &quot;
• < becomes &lt;
• > becomes &gt;

❌ Forgetting About Mobile-First Indexing

The Mistake: Not ensuring that URLs in your sitemap are accessible and optimized for mobile devices.

Why It's Bad: Google primarily uses mobile versions of pages for indexing and ranking.

The Fix: Ensure all URLs in your sitemap are mobile-friendly. Test your pages with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

❌ Setting All Priorities to 1.0

The Mistake: Marking every page as maximum priority (1.0) thinking it will boost rankings.

Why It's Bad: If everything is high priority, nothing is. Search engines may ignore your priority hints entirely.

The Fix: Use priority strategically to indicate relative importance of pages on your site. Reserve 1.0 for your most important landing pages.