Your Sitemap Is Supposed to Help. It Is Probably Hurting.
Here are the seven mistakes we see constantly across 500+ campaigns.
1. Including noindexed pages. You told Google not to index it (read our noindex guide if you are unsure how). Then you put it in the sitemap telling Google to index it. Pick a lane.
2. Listing redirect URLs. Your sitemap says "crawl this." Google crawls it, gets redirected somewhere else. Wasted budget. Conflicting signals.
3. Stale URLs. Pages you deleted months ago still sitting in the sitemap, returning 404s.
4. Wrong canonical URLs. Including the non-canonical version instead of the canonical one.
5. Fake lastmod dates. Setting every page to today's date. Google notices. Google stops trusting your lastmod. Then when you actually update a page, Google does not prioritize re-crawling it.
6. One massive sitemap. Over 50,000 URLs in a single file with no sitemap index. Break it up by content type.
7. Not submitting it. You created it but never submitted it in Search Console and never referenced it in robots.txt. Google may find it eventually. Or it may not.
Anyhoo.
Fix these seven things and your indexation rate will improve. That is not a guess — it is what we have seen across 20+ years of doing this.
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