Sitemap Health Analyzer

Why Your Sitemap Matters

Your XML sitemap is the single most important signal you give to search engine crawlers about what content exists on your site. If your sitemap contains broken URLs, redirects, malformed <loc> entries, or excludes newly published pages, search bots will either miss your content entirely or waste crawl budget on dead pages.

The Sitemap Health Analyzer acts as a continuous watchdog, validating the structure, URL integrity, and freshness of your sitemap, and automatically alerting you when issues arise.

What the Analyzer Validates

When you run a sitemap check, the platform fetches your sitemap from your domain and validates it against Google's published sitemap specification:

• Root Element Check: Verifies the presence of a <urlset> or <sitemapindex> root element. A missing or malformed root element means the sitemap is invisible to search bots.
• Schema Validation: Checks that the sitemap is well-formed XML. Unclosed tags, encoding errors, and missing closing elements are flagged.
• URL Count Limits: Confirms that no single sitemap file exceeds 50,000 URLs or 50MB, Google's hard limits. Oversized sitemaps are silently truncated by search bots, causing URLs beyond the limit to never be discovered.
• Malformed `<loc>` Entries: Validates that every <loc> URL is a properly formatted absolute HTTP/HTTPS URL. Relative URLs, mailto links, or whitespace-padded entries are flagged.
• `<lastmod>` Date Format: Checks that modification dates use the W3C date format (YYYY-MM-DD or ISO 8601). Incorrectly formatted dates cause Google to ignore the timestamp, reducing crawl prioritization.
• Content-Type Header: Verifies the sitemap is served with an application/xml content type header. Wrong content types can confuse some crawlers.
• Sitemap Index Support: If your site uses a sitemap index (a sitemap of sitemaps), the analyzer fetches each child sitemap (up to 50 child sitemaps, up to 10,000 total URLs) and validates them all.

Automatic Sitemap Polling

The platform continuously polls your sitemap on a schedule to discover new URLs you've published. This powers the auto-indexing flow:

1. 1The poller fetches your sitemap and extracts all <loc> URLs.
2. 2It compares them against the list of URLs it has already submitted to search engines.
3. 3Any new URLs (ones it has never seen before) are automatically queued for indexing, submitted in batches of 50 to avoid API rate limits.
4. 4The poll result is logged: how many URLs were discovered in total, and how many were new.

This means every time you publish a new post on your CMS, the sitemap poller picks it up and submits it to Google and Bing without you doing anything.

Google Sitemap Resubmission

In addition to URL-level submissions, the platform can re-ping Google's Webmasters API with your entire sitemap, telling Google to re-crawl and re-evaluate your full site structure:

• Requires your Google Search Console account to be connected via OAuth (set up under Settings → Integrations → Google Search Console).
• The platform uses your verified GSC property URL to construct the sitemap endpoint automatically.
• If your Google connection is missing the sitemap-write permission scope, the dashboard shows a specific error and a direct link to reconnect with the correct permissions.

Frequently Asked Questions