Indexing & Crawl

Sitemap Quality

Your sitemap tells Google which pages you want found. Sitemap Quality lists every one of those pages next to what Search Console says it actually earned over the last 90 days — so you can see which listed pages never appear in search at all.

How it works

  1. Once a week (or when the site owner presses Scan sitemap, at most once a day) MetricsTab reads the sitemaps Search Console knows for your site, or /sitemap.xml if it knows none. A sitemap index is followed one level deep, up to 50 sitemaps and 50,000 URLs.
  2. Each listed URL is matched to its Search Console clicks and impressions for the last 90 days. Formatting differences (upper-case host, trailing slash) don't count as a mismatch, but a different host does — a sitemap listing http:// or the wrong www. version is itself worth fixing.
  3. Pages with no impressions are listed first.

What to do with it

  • No impressions: the page is in your sitemap but Google never showed it. Check it is indexed (Index Coverage), that it isn't a duplicate or thin page, and that other pages link to it. If it shouldn't rank, take it out of the sitemap.
  • Problems reading the sitemap are listed above the table in plain words — for example a sitemap Search Console was given that now returns 404.

Safety and limits

  • Only sitemaps on your own domain (or its subdomains) are read, through our crawler, which obeys your robots.txt.
  • Files over 10 MB (also after unzipping), more than 50 sitemaps in an index, or more than 50,000 URLs are cut off, and the report says so.
  • The list is the latest scan. Pages added since then appear after the next weekly scan.

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