By the Seovoro Team · Last updated October 13, 2026
Key takeaways
- A sitemap should list only live pages that return a normal 200 status and that you want in search.
- Broken, redirected or noindexed URLs in a sitemap send search engines mixed signals.
- Extract the URLs, check each status, then remove or fix the bad ones and resubmit.
- Search Console's page indexing report shows many of these problems for you.
Your XML sitemap is a list of pages you want search engines to crawl. If it contains pages that no longer exist, that redirect elsewhere, or that you have told search engines not to index, it stops being a clean list. This guide shows a simple way to check your sitemap for broken links and fix what you find.
In this guide
- What should be in a sitemap
- Step 1: Get every URL out of the sitemap
- Step 2: Check the status of each URL
- Step 3: Decide what to do with each result
- Step 4: Update the sitemap and resubmit
- How to keep it clean
- Frequently asked questions
What should be in a sitemap
Include only canonical, indexable pages that return a normal 200 status. Leave out pages that return 404 or 410, pages that redirect, pages blocked in robots.txt, pages with a noindex tag and duplicate versions of the same page. A single sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed.
Step 1: Get every URL out of the sitemap
Open your sitemap, or use our free Sitemap URL Extractor to list every URL, including those inside a sitemap index, and copy them or download a CSV. If you have not checked the file itself yet, run it through the Sitemap Validator first.
Step 2: Check the status of each URL
You need the HTTP status of every URL. For a handful of pages, open them or use our Redirect Checker. For a whole site, a crawler or our Broken Link Scanner Bot can check many pages at once. Google Search Console also reports problems in the Pages report, such as "Submitted URL not found (404)".
Step 3: Decide what to do with each result
| Status | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | Page works | Keep it |
| 301 or 308 | Moved permanently | Replace the sitemap URL with the final address |
| 302, 303 or 307 | Temporary move | Check if it should be permanent, then update |
| 404 or 410 | Page is gone | Remove it, or restore the page if it should exist |
| 5xx | Server error | Fix the server problem, then check again |
Step 4: Update the sitemap and resubmit
Remove or replace the bad URLs, upload the new sitemap and submit it again in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also make sure your robots.txt has a Sitemap line. Our Robots.txt Generator can create it.
How to keep it clean
Generate the sitemap automatically so removed pages drop out of it, and check it after every redesign, migration or big content cleanup.
Frequently asked questions
Do broken links in a sitemap hurt rankings?
Not as a direct penalty, but they waste crawling and send mixed signals. A clean sitemap helps search engines focus on the pages that matter.
Should redirected URLs be in a sitemap?
No. List the final destination URL instead.
How often should I check my sitemap?
After any big change to the site, and about once a month on a site that changes often.
Does a valid sitemap guarantee indexing?
No. It helps discovery, but Google decides what to index.