One row per sitemap, everything that matters on it.
Status
Success, has errors, or pending. The same status Google shows on the web, with a colour so the problem one stands out.
Discovered URLs
How many URLs Google found in the sitemap. A sudden drop usually means the sitemap generator broke; a number that never rises means Google has stopped reading it.
Last read
When Google last fetched the sitemap. Healthy sites see this update regularly; if it stalls for weeks, Google may have lost interest or the file is unreachable.
Every property
Switch sites from the picker at the top and the sitemap list follows. Handy for checking a dozen client sites in a minute.
Issues
Open a sitemap with errors or warnings to see what Google reported: unreachable URLs, invalid XML, URLs outside the property and so on. PRO
Read-only
The app shows sitemaps; it cannot submit or delete them, because it only asks for Google's read-only scope. Submit new sitemaps in Search Console on the web.
Why sitemaps still matter.
A sitemap is a list of the URLs on your site you want Google to know about, usually generated by your CMS. Google does not need one to find a well-linked site, but a sitemap gets new and updated pages discovered sooner, and it is the easiest way to tell Google about pages that are hard to reach by links alone. For large sites, news sites and anything that publishes often, it is the main way new URLs enter the queue.
What the sitemap report tells you that nothing else does
- Whether Google can read the file. A sitemap that 404s, returns the wrong content type or contains invalid XML is silently ignored. The status here is the first place that shows.
- Whether it is current. Discovered URLs and last read together tell you if Google is still picking up what you publish.
- Why pages are "Discovered, currently not indexed". If the Indexing report shows a lot of those, the sitemap is usually how Google found them, and a healthy sitemap is step one in getting them crawled.
Common sitemap problems
- The sitemap lists URLs that redirect, or that are blocked by robots.txt, so Google discards them.
- The CMS plugin generates the file but the URL submitted to Google is the old one.
- The sitemap is enormous and rarely changes, so Google reads it less and less often. Splitting it, with an index file, helps.
lastmoddates that update on every build, which teaches Google to ignore them.
Keep an eye on your sitemaps from your phone.
Free for every property on your account.
Download for iPhone