Your website’s sitemap is a file that provides Google with the most important pages on your site. However, sometimes, you’ll experience errors with your sitemap status. You can check out the following video by Daniel Waisberg from Google to learn more about what sitemaps are and how they work.
Sometimes, the problem is a simple management issue. Learn more about managing your sitemap now to determine whether your problem is related to management.
What is a Sitemap Wrong Format Error?
Think of pages interconnected within a domain – that’s a sitemap. It’s the index of a website’s contents, and it’s often underestimated because it can’t be seen by human visitors. With the heightened convenience of creating sitemaps through plugins and generators, the number of errors also rises.
What Triggers the Issue?
A sitemap format error usually occurs when there are missing XML tags, too many tags, or untagged videos on your website.
A formatting error usually occurs when you use the Yoast SEO plugin. The Yoast SEO tool isn’t supported as well as other plugins. If you already use Yoast and have the sitemap format issue, you can’t do much to change it or find a solution anymore.
How To Check the Issue
To check for errors in your sitemap and avoid 301 redirects and 404 errors, you can use site crawlers to confirm URLs and highlight any possible issues.
Our tool is adept at identifying different sitemap errors that could be affecting your website’s SEO performance. When you select the “XML sitemaps” category, it’s not just about the number of issues detected; it’s about gaining actionable insights. By clicking on “View issue,” you’ll be presented with a clear list of specific sitemap problems. This feature allows you to see the exact pages affected by the issue and offers guidance on resolving them, ensuring that search engines can efficiently crawl and index your site’s content.
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Why is it Important?
An optimized and organized sitemap is critical, as they prevent web crawlers from missing your page’s important links while caching information. Sitemaps help the crawlers make sure new updates on your website are reflected in the search engine.
How To Fix a Format Error
Fix the issue by going to the dashboard through your all-in-one SEO plugin.
- Click the XML sitemap button.
- The first thing you want to do is to recreate your sitemap by making a minor change on the map. The change can be as simple as removing the scheduled updates or switching them to a different update frequency. After that, update your sitemap to regenerate and restore it.
- After you update it, check the map with your audit tool. If the format error still occurs, continue to the next step.
- Step two is to uncheck the boxes for all types of taxonomies. You should also look for the “dynamically generate sitemap” box and uncheck it. Lastly, select pages and posts, which you can find under post types. Disable or uncheck the boxes for all other post types except the two mentioned above (pages and posts).
- Get your sitemap up to date again by clicking on update. Repeat the update step and use your SEO audit tool to see if your XML format error is fixed.
If something is still wrong with your sitemap, you can do one last thing to ensure that the XML files are in order, and that is to disable the indexes.
Typically, the sitemap format error will be gone at this point. In the rare case that it still remains, the next best thing you can do is submit a ticket. Instead of dealing with the error by yourself, your SEO company will help you find a solution.
