Is Google regularly fetching and using your website’s XML sitemap file? So, an XML sitemap is a list of all the URLs on your website that you want Google to index and rank in search results. So, you want to make sure that Google is regularly using your website’s XML sitemap file to find that list of URLs. The XML sitemap isn’t the only way that Google can discover the URLs that exist on your website, but it’s one of the more important ways, and so it’s important that Google come back to your website’s XML file regularly and that Google is making correct decisions about what you have listed in the XML sitemap file.
So, to start understanding the XML sitemap file better, you can use Google Search Console’s sitemaps reports. So, in Google Search Console, click on sitemaps in the sidebar. In the sitemaps report, you’ll see any sitemaps that have already been submitted. If you don’t have any submitted here, you can add a new sitemap. Simply enter the sitemap URL and then click submit. Your website sitemap URL is going to be different depending on your content management system, depending on what plugins you might be using.
So, you want to check and see on your website what your XML sitemap URL is. Check with your developer and see. You can also try going to yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and see if your sitemap lives there or redirects to some other URL. Your sitemap can live at any URL. There’s no one URL that it must be. Whatever your URLs are, you can enter those here.
Once you’ve entered them, give it a few days and then you’ll start to see this populating with some data in here. In the table of submitted sitemaps, there’s a few pieces of information that I think are really important to pay attention to. The first of those is the last read date. So, read here means that Google fetched the XML sitemap, they processed the XML sitemap, they actually looked at what the XML sitemap contained.
Now, Google is not going to hit every XML sitemap every day. So, you want to make sure that your XML sitemaps are getting read at least somewhat often. I typically say that an XML sitemap should be read typically within last couple of weeks. If it’s much older than that, much further back since Google last read the XML sitemap, that could start to indicate some problems. Certainly, if it goes more than a month without Google reading the XML sitemap file, that might mean that there’s some sort of problem with Google being able to access things on your website or being able to access that particular XML sitemap file.
So, it’s something to dig into and look at. Again, not necessarily that it’s a big problem or a guaranteed problem. Sometimes Google just doesn’t go back to the XML sitemap that often, but it is something to pay attention to and look at and see what’s going on. The other number to pay attention to is discovered pages.
So, discovered pages tells you how many pages Google has discovered in this XML sitemap. Now, 9 times out of 10, this is going to match how many URLs there actually are in the XML sitemap. But occasionally, you are going to come across a situation where Google is reporting a higher or lower number of URLs discovered in the XML sitemap than actually exist in the XML sitemap. And that, if it does happen, can indicate issues with the XML sitemap being malformed or something being broken about the sitemap logic.
So, it’s something to keep a little bit of an eye on and see if there’s any issues here. The more useful stuff though happens when you click into the XML sitemap. So, if you select one of these XML sitemaps and click into it, you can get into the more detailed information about not just is Google fetching this XML sitemap, but what are they doing with it. So, on here, you want to click one more time to see page indexing. This will take you to the page indexing report, but this is filtered to that particular XML sitemap.
So, we are not just looking at the overall picture of indexing on the website, but specifically what’s happening with this sitemap’s URLs. How many of these URLs are actually moving into the index or not? And presumably, if these are URLs in my sitemap, these are URLs that I wanted to have moved into the index. So, it’d be a big problem if they’re not indexed on here.
Now, if I do see that there are pages not indexed, I need to understand why that is. And what those URLs are, so that way I can start trying to fix those URLs and see if I can get those moving into the index. To understand that, I can scroll down to the Y pages aren’t indexed table, and I can see the different reasons things are listed here that things are not included in the index. In this case, I’ve got discovered currently not indexed and crawled currently not indexed. I have some other videos on our channel that are talking about these issues and more generally about the page indexing report, so you can check that out for more.
Now, you can also look at what’s happening with your sitemaps in Bing Webmaster Tools. Their reports aren’t quite as detailed, but in Bing Webmaster Tools, you can click on sitemaps in the sidebar. Here again, you can see all the sitemaps that they’ve found. You can also go up here to submit a sitemap. You can enter the sitemap URL and submit that as well to Bing, just like you would to Google.
On here, they’ll tell you how many sitemaps were found, how many URLs were discovered. You can see the date it was last crawled. This is the equivalent of last read in Google Search Console. And if you click on any one of these sitemap index files, you can see the individual sitemaps listed in there. A sitemap index is just a sitemap of sitemaps.
So, you can see more details about this, and then you can see when these individual sitemaps were read. Here again, you want to make sure that these sitemaps were read or crawled fairly recently. And if they are not that could indicate some problems that you want to dig into. You can also see how many URLs were discovered in these XML sitemaps to indicate whether or not all the URLs are listed there as they should be.
If you have any questions about your website’s XML sitemap files, you have any questions more generally about working with Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, or need help optimizing your website for technical SEO and AI search, please let me know. You can email me at [email protected]. If you liked this video, please subscribe. Thank you for watching.