Sitemap Generator: Common Mistakes and Best Practices

Most problems with sitemap Generator aren't caused by not knowing what to do — they're caused by small, easy-to-miss mistakes that compound quietly over time. Here are the ones that come up most often.

Mistake 1: Including URLs that are blocked by robots.txt — Google can't reconcile 'crawl this' with 'don't crawl this' and will just ignore the entry.

Mistake 2: Forgetting to update the sitemap after a site migration, leaving thousands of old URLs pointing at redirects.

Mistake 3: Treating the sitemap as an indexing guarantee — it's a hint, not a directive; Google still decides what to actually index.

The fix for most of these isn't more effort, it's a regular check. A few habits that prevent them from creeping back in:
- Update it every time you publish, unpublish, or permanently remove a page — a stale sitemap is worse than no sitemap because it actively misleads crawlers.
- Submit the sitemap URL in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools once, then let your CMS or a scheduled job keep it current automatically.

Worth reading alongside this: our guide to meta title and description tags, which covers the adjacent side of the same part of a technical SEO audit.

Sitemap Generator catches most of this automatically, which is the easiest way to stop these mistakes from shipping in the first place.

Everything in this guide runs directly in your browser — no signup, no install.