SEO & indexing
Your sitemap,
and how much of it we read
Reads the sitemap at the address you give, and your robots.txt, and reports what it found. It tells you how much arrived before it tells you anything else — because a rule that needs to see the whole file cannot answer about a file that was cut off, and this one says so instead of guessing.
This tool works differently from the generator. The generator never uploads your image — it runs in your browser. The checker cannot: it fetches the public address you type, from our server, and reads the sitemap at the address you give and your site’s robots.txt, and nothing else — not one of the addresses listed inside the sitemap is visited, however many there are. Only the address you enter is sent. The addresses you check are then kept in this browser, so it can tell you what changed since last time; they go nowhere, and you can clear them.
Questions
Why does it say “not measured” instead of telling me my sitemap is fine?
Because it stopped reading at 512 KB and your file was bigger. Any rule of the form “nothing in this file is wrong” is looking at the beginning and being asked about the whole, so it withholds rather than passing. Anything it did find wrong in the part it read is still reported — a fault found in a prefix is real, an absence is not.
Does it check that the pages in my sitemap actually work?
No, and this is the thing worth knowing before you trust a clean report. Not one of the addresses inside your sitemap is visited. A sitemap listing ten thousand pages that all return 404 passes every rule here, because every rule here is about the file rather than about the pages. Checking the pages means one request each, at somebody else’s server, which is a different tool with a different limit.
My sitemap is a .gz file. Why did it not read it?
Because it does not decompress, and it would rather say so than pretend. A gzipped file read as text does not fail — it produces characters that are not text, and every rule would then be describing that noise while looking perfectly confident. Point it at the uncompressed file, or at the sitemap index that names it.
It says my priority and changefreq values are fine. Do they do anything?
Probably not. Google’s own documentation says it ignores both, and that is quoted in the report rather than argued here. They are still checked against the range and the list the sitemap protocol publishes, because a value outside either is a sign your generator is doing something odd — but a correct value is not an advantage.
I gave it a sitemap index. Why did it not check the sitemaps inside?
Because a report about “the first child, whichever that turned out to be” would be a report about two documents under one title. The index itself is read — its structure, its namespace, the addresses it names — and the files it points at are listed for you to check one at a time.