Teardown
Sitemaps that list pages which redirect or fail
A sitemap is the list you hand Google on purpose. Almost half the sites I audited had old addresses on it.
On this page
A sitemap is the one list of pages you give Google deliberately. 19 of the 42 startup sites I audited had addresses on it that redirect somewhere else, and 8 had addresses that ended in an error.
The second number nearly came out much higher. The crawler first put both kinds under one heading, which would have said half of all sites listed broken pages. Fetching them again showed most were redirects, not dead pages, so they are counted separately here.
What I found
42 startup sites, 14,023 pages, crawled 15 to 18 September 2026
- Redirecting addresses listed
- 19 of 42 sites (45%), 4 on the median affected site
- Failing addresses listed
- 8 of 42 sites (19%), 1 on the median affected site
- Re-checked live
- 25 of 25 sampled failing addresses still failed on 20 September
Why sitemaps go stale
The sitemap is often produced from a different list than the pages themselves: a content system's records, a hand-kept file, a plugin's own table. When a page is renamed, deleted or redirected, the page changes and the list does not.
A sitemap made from the pages the site actually serves cannot drift like that. One kept separately always will, eventually.
What a sitemap is for, in Google's words
Google's guidance on sitemaps comes down to one line:
Include the URLs in your sitemap that you want to see in Google's search results.
Google Search Central, building a sitemap
A redirecting address is not the page you want in results; the page it redirects to is. A failing address cannot be in results at all:
In the case of Google Search, Google doesn't index URLs that return a 4xx status code, and URLs that are already indexed and return a 4xx status code are removed from the index.
Google Search Central, HTTP status codes
Neither breaks anything on its own. Google follows the redirect and drops the dead page. The cost is a list that says one thing while the site says another, and a Search Console report full of noise that hides the problems that do matter.
Check your own site, no code needed
- Once Search Console is set up, open the Pages report.
- In the filter above the chart, choose All submitted pages. That limits the report to the addresses in your sitemap.
- Look for Page with redirect and Not found (404) among the reasons. Anything there is a sitemap entry pointing at the wrong address.
What to ask your developer
- Is the sitemap made from the pages the site serves, or from a separate list?
- When a page is removed or redirected, does the sitemap update on its own?
What I could not tell from outside
I read each sitemap once, between 15 and 18 September. Sitemaps change, and some of these may already be fixed.
These are counts on 42 startup sites I audited from the outside, mostly developer tools and SaaS. They are not an industry average, and nothing here measured whether any of these sites performed worse in search because of what I found.
Want to know which of these your site has?
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