Validate your sitemap.xml
Most sitemap problems are silent: the file loads, the crawler reads it, and a chunk of your pages are quietly skipped. This checks the document against the sitemap protocol and tells you which entries would be dropped, and why.
Free, no signup, no limits worth mentioning.
What gets checked
The file is fetched and parsed the same way an indexer would parse it. You get the document kind — a urlset or a sitemap index — the number of entries, the file size, a sample of the URLs it contains, and every parse error found.
Typical errors are malformed XML, entries missing a <loc>, and relative URLs where the protocol requires absolute ones. Any of those cost you the affected entries without any visible sign that something went wrong.
Errors and warnings are not the same thing
An error means entries would actually be dropped. A warning means something is misconfigured but every major crawler tolerates it — a sitemap served as text/html rather than application/xml is the common one.
They are reported separately on purpose. Calling a working sitemap invalid because of its content-type header would be wrong, and would send you off fixing the thing that was not broken.
Common questions
How many URLs is a single sitemap allowed to contain?
50,000, and the uncompressed file must stay under 50MB. Past either limit you split the file and list the parts in a sitemap index.
My sitemap is served as text/html. Is that a problem?
It is reported as a warning rather than an error. Every major crawler parses it anyway, so nothing is being dropped, but serving it as application/xml is the correct configuration.
Does a valid sitemap mean my pages will be indexed?
No. A sitemap tells crawlers which pages exist and is a request, not an instruction. Whether a page is indexed also depends on its robots directives, its content, and the crawler's own judgement.
Can it validate a sitemap index?
Yes. It detects which of the two document types you gave it and reports the kind back, so you can confirm the file is what you thought it was.
Now let it answer your visitors' questions
TeklTalk reads the same pages you just checked and answers questions about them, with a link back to the page each answer came from.
Free to start. No credit card required.