Sitemaps & robots.txt
A sitemap exceeds 50,000 URLs
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on a whole site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
- Based on
- Google's own documentation
What is wrong
A sitemap file on your website contains more than 50,000 URLs. Google's sitemap standard limits each sitemap file to 50,000 entries. When you exceed this limit, Google may not read all the URLs you have listed, because it stops processing the file at the threshold.
Why it costs you
This means some of your pages won't be included in the sitemap that you're offering to Google. Those pages become harder for Google to find and index, especially if they're not linked from your main navigation or from other pages on your site. You'll have fewer pages in search results.
How to fix it
Split your sitemap into multiple files, each containing no more than 50,000 URLs. Then create a sitemap index file that lists all of these separate sitemaps and submit that index file to Google Search Console instead. The sitemap index itself can point to up to 13 separate sitemap files. If you have more URLs than that, you'll need multiple sitemap indexes, but this is uncommon. Detailed instructions for creating a sitemap index are in Google's sitemap documentation.
What the audit tests
- No sitemap file lists more than 50,000 addresses
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