How important are sitemap errors?

[nicole.healthline]

If there aren't any crawling / indexing issues with your site, how important do thing sitemap errors are? Do you work to always fix all errors?

I know here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds

Duane Forrester mentions that sites with many 302's 301's will be punished--does any one know Googe's take on this?

[dawnieando]

Very important.  Particularly if you have a large site.  We operate a large site with 100,000's of pages and as Dan said it can be difficult to maintain.  We use something called Unlimited XML Sitemap Generator which builds XML sitemaps for us automatically.  I'd highly recommend it although it takes a bit of fiddling with to get it up and running as it's software which sits on site.  We couldn't manage without it as we'd be forever on sitemaps.

We found that getting sitemaps right on a large site made a huge difference to the crawl rate that we encountered in GWT and a huge indexation to follow.

In particular check for 302's.  I made the mistake of leaving those for a while and am sure that we suffered from some loss of link equity along the way.

Hope it helps

Dawn

[loopyal]

Your sitemap should only list pages that actually exist.

If you delete some pages, then you need to rebuild the sitemap.

Ditto if you delete them and redirect.

Google is always lagging, so if you delete 10 pages and then update the sitemap, even if google downloads the sitemap immediately, they will still be running crawls on the old map, and they may be crawling the now-missing pages, but haven't shown the failures in your WMT yet.

If you update your sitemap quickly, it is possible they will never crawl the missing pages and get a 404 or 301.

(but of course, there could be other sites pointing to the now-missing pages, and the 404s will show up elsewhere as missing)

I am always checking, adding, deleting and redirecting pages, and I update the current sitemap every hour and all the others are rebuilt at midnight every night. I usually do deletions just before midnight if I can, to minimize the time the sitemap is out of sync.

[evolvingSEO]

As far as I know Google is more lenient with sitemap errors, but I would still recommend looking into it. The first step would be to be sure your sitemap is up to date to begin with - and has all the URLs you want (and not any you don't want). The main thing is none of them should 404 and then beyond that, yes, they should return 200's.

Unless you're dealing with a gigantic site which might be hard to maintain, in theory there shouldn't be errors in sitemaps if you have the correct URLs in there.

Even better, if you're running WordPress the Yoast SEO plugin will generate an XML sitemap for you and it update automatically.

Hope that helps!

-Dan