Google Search Console Crawl and Sitemap Errors

Many people submit generated XML sitemaps directly to Google Search Console. However, when viewing diagnostics for website URLs and sitemaps, you will sometimes see mysterious problems being reported.

When viewing the list of submitted sitemaps, you can see if any of them have issues. It is important to note that all problems will cause significant problems for Google when crawling your website and XML sitemap file.

It is possible to see details about the errors by clicking the sitemap file in the list. This was possible even back when Google Search Console was called Google Webmaster Tools:

An error often reported for URLs is 404 : Not Found. You may get such errors even if your website has no internal linking errors and your XML sitemap is 100% correct:



Google follows links from websites all over the internet and remembers these for quite a long time. In our experience, this means that if some website at some point in time has linked to a non-existing page at your website, Google will keep reporting this as an error for a long time.

Examples of how incorrect links to your website can occur on external websites:

• Someone posted and mistyped a link to your website on a forum.
• You posted a link on a website which incorrectly shortened it.

Your generated XML sitemaps can not contain URLs that redirect if you want Google sitemap tools to accept them. This includes error codes 301 : Moved Permanently, 302 : Found and 302 : Moved Temporarily.

Tip: A1 Sitemap Generator never includes URLs that redirect unless explicitly configured so. Instead it will include the redirect destination URLs.