Sitemap audit error codes and validation rules

Sitemap audits validate the structure, accessibility, and content accuracy of your news sitemaps. Each audit below identifies a specific issue that can prevent search engines from correctly discovering or indexing your articles. For a broader view of all audit categories, see Audits overview.

News sitemap exceeds 1000 elements

Code: sitemap_loc_size A news sitemap may have up to 1,000 news:news tags. If there are more than 1,000 <news:news> tags in a news sitemap, split your sitemap into several smaller sitemaps. Read more

Found non new articles in news sitemap

Code: sitemap_publicationDate_recent News items older than 48 hours should not be included in news sitemap, with reference to <news:publication_date>. Read more

<news:publication> tag not found

Code: sitemap_publication_notNull All <news:news> nodes within a news sitemap must have a <news:publication> tag. Some elements have been found without one. Read more

<news:name> tag not found

Code: sitemap_publication_name_notNull All <news:news> nodes within a news sitemap must have a <news:name> tag. Some elements have been found without one. Read more

<news:language> tag not found

Code: sitemap_publication_lang_notNull All <news:news> nodes within a news sitemap must have a <news:language> tag. Some elements have been found without one. Read more

<news:language> format is not valid

Code: sitemap_publication_lang_format The <news:language> tag within the <news:publication> node must be valid with respect to the ISO 639 language code. Read more

<news:publication_date> tag not found

Code: sitemap_publicationDate_notNull All <news:news> nodes within a news sitemap must have a <news:publication_date> tag. Some elements have been found without one. Read more

<news:publication_date> format is not valid

Code: sitemap_publicationDate_date_format The <news:publication_date> tag within the <news:publication> node must be valid with respect to the W3C Format (ISO 8601). Read more

<news:title> tag not found

Code: sitemap_title_notNull All <news:news> nodes within a news sitemap must have a <news:title> tag. Some elements have been found without one. Read more

Multiple <news:news> tags found inside same node

Code: sitemap_news_unique The <news:news> tag within each url node must be unique. More than one <news:news> element inside the <url> node have been found. Read more

Sitemap XML parsing failed

Code: sitemap_parse Sitemaps should be formatted in XML. It has not been possible to correctly parse the sitemaps listed below, their XML formatting should be reviewed. Read more

Sitemap XXX response

Code: sitemap_XXX Request to sitemaps declared in Google Search Console should always result in a 200 HTTP response. For the cases listed below, request resulted in a XXX (response code description).

Connection timed out

Code: sitemap_connectionTimeout The system has received a timeout when trying to connect to these URLs.

Received an empty response

Code: sitemap_emptyResponse The system has not been able to trace the content of these pages as they are apparently blank. Please double-check to ensure this is the expected behavior.

Connection failed

Code: sitemap_connectionFailed The system has not been able to validate the information in these URLs.

Multiple redirections

Code: sitemap_multipleRedirection The web server has returned a redirection status code (300 to 399) for a location that had already been redirected. Canonical URL redirections should not be chained.

Redirection to unavailable location

Code: sitemap_unavailableAfterRedirection URL responds with a redirection HTTP code (3XX) and a “location” header pointing to some different URL which in turn returns an invalid code (4XX, 5XX).

Publish date does not match with the one declared in sitemap

Code: sitemap_publicationDate_matches_editorial_sd The publish date found in the article does not match the one found in the news sitemap the article is featured in.

Title does not match with the one declared in sitemap

Code: sitemap_title_matches_editorial_sd The title found in the article does not match the one found in the news sitemap the article is featured in.

Article not present in sitemap

Code: canonical_url_found_in_sitemap The article’s canonical URL has not been found in any news sitemap declared in Google Search Console for this domain. All news articles should be present in a news sitemap as soon as they are published.

URL found in sitemap is not canonical

Code: sitemap_url_is_canonical Non-canonical URLs have been found in the listed sitemaps. Including non-canonical URLs in sitemaps can undermine their utility for search engines, because crawlers may waste budget on duplicate pages instead of indexing the preferred version. To quickly identify all active sitemap issues, filter the Audits module by the Sitemaps impact category.