How to Fix Sitemap Errors in Google Search Console
Google Search Console reports sitemap errors under Index, then Sitemaps. These errors stop Google from crawling and indexing your pages, and unlike ranking drops, they give you explicit diagnostic information you can act on immediately. This guide covers every common sitemap error — from fetch failures and redirect conflicts to noindex contradictions and soft 404s — and explains exactly how to fix each one. The fastest way to find all these errors at once is to run your sitemap through a free sitemap checker — it surfaces broken URLs, redirect chains, noindex conflicts, and missing pages in one pass so you can prioritize fixes by impact.
1. Could Not Fetch Sitemap
This means Google cannot access your sitemap URL. Common causes: the sitemap file does not exist at that URL, the server returned a non-200 status code, authentication is required, or a firewall is blocking Googlebot. Fix it by visiting your sitemap URL directly in a browser. If it loads for you but fails for Google, check your server logs for Googlebot requests and confirm you are not blocking it via IP restrictions or your robots.txt.
2. Submitted URL Blocked by Robots.txt
One or more URLs in your sitemap are blocked by your robots.txt file. Googlebot cannot crawl blocked URLs, so including them in your sitemap creates a contradiction. Fix it by checking your robots.txt at /robots.txt and removing any Disallow rules that match the URLs in question. If the URLs should be blocked from crawling, remove them from your sitemap instead. Never have a URL in your sitemap that is also blocked in robots.txt.
3. Submitted URL Has Redirect
Your sitemap contains a URL that redirects to another URL. Sitemaps should only contain canonical, final destination URLs. Fix it by updating the sitemap to use the destination URL after the redirect. If you have URLs redirecting from HTTP to HTTPS, update them to HTTPS. If you have URLs with trailing slash redirects, standardize them.
4. Submitted URL Returns 404
A URL in your sitemap no longer exists. Fix it by either restoring the page, redirecting the URL to its replacement, or removing it from the sitemap. Stale 404 URLs in your sitemap waste crawl budget and create errors in Search Console.
5. Submitted URL Marked Noindex
A URL in your sitemap has a noindex tag. This is a contradiction - your sitemap tells Google to index the page but the noindex tag tells Google not to. Fix it by either removing the noindex tag if you want the page indexed, or removing the URL from the sitemap if you intentionally do not want it indexed.
6. Sitemap Could Not Be Read (Parse Error)
Your sitemap XML is malformed. Common causes: special characters not properly encoded (use & not &), incorrect XML structure, or a PHP/server error printing before the XML. Validate your sitemap using the XML Sitemap Validator or paste it into an XML validator. Fix any encoding errors or structural issues.
7. Submitted URL Is Soft 404
A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 status code but displays a 'page not found' or empty content message. Google detects these and will not index them, even though your sitemap says they exist. Fix it by restoring the actual content if the page should exist, or returning a proper 404 or 301 redirect if it should not. Common causes include deleted WooCommerce products that show 'product unavailable' while still returning 200.
8. Submitted URL Not Selected as Canonical
Google chose a different canonical URL than the one in your sitemap. This happens when you have duplicate content — for example, the same page accessible via www and non-www, HTTP and HTTPS, or with and without trailing slashes. Google picks what it considers the canonical version and ignores the others. Fix it by implementing consistent canonicalization across your site: use HTTPS everywhere, pick one domain format, add self-referencing canonical tags on every page, and ensure your sitemap uses only canonical URLs.
9. Sitemap Fetched Successfully But Pages Not Indexed
A 'Success' status in the Sitemaps report means Google processed the sitemap — not that it indexed all the pages. If pages remain unindexed despite a successful sitemap fetch, the issue is content quality or crawl budget, not the sitemap itself. Check the Pages report for 'Crawled - currently not indexed' or 'Discovered - currently not indexed' statuses. These indicate Google found the pages but decided not to index them — usually due to thin content, duplicate content, or low authority signals on the page.
10. Sitemap Contains Too Many URLs per File
A single XML sitemap file cannot exceed 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed. Exceeding either limit causes a parse error. If your site is large, split your sitemap into multiple child sitemaps and reference them from a sitemap index file. For example: sitemap-blog.xml, sitemap-products.xml, sitemap-categories.xml, all listed in sitemap_index.xml. Submit only the sitemap index URL to Search Console. This also makes error diagnosis easier — you can pinpoint which section of your site has the most indexing issues.
How to Fix Sitemap Errors Faster
SitemapFixer automatically detects all of these errors - it fetches your sitemap, checks every URL for status codes, redirect chains, noindex tags, and robots.txt conflicts, and gives you a prioritized fix list. Try it free at sitemapfixer.com.