Sitemap Troubleshooting

When adding a new project or updating an existing sitemap, Evergreen attempts to fetch and parse your sitemap file(s). If issues are detected, you'll see a troubleshooting guide with details about what went wrong.

Common sitemap issues fall into a few categories:

1. Network or Server Errors

These issues prevent Evergreen from even downloading your sitemap file.

Symptoms:

• "Network error"
• "Failed to connect to host"
• "Connection timed out"
• HTTP status codes like 500 Internal Server Error, 502 Bad Gateway, 503 Service Unavailable, 404 Not Found.

How to resolve:

• Check your sitemap URL: Ensure the URL you provided is correct and accessible in a web browser.
• Verify server status: Check if your website's server is online and responding.
• Firewall/WAF rules: Your server's firewall or a Web Application Firewall (WAF) might be blocking Evergreen's crawler. Ensure our user-agent (Evergreenbot) is allowed access.
• DNS issues: Confirm your domain's DNS records are correctly configured.
• SSL/TLS issues: Ensure your HTTPS certificate is valid and correctly installed.
• Temporary outage: Sometimes these are transient issues. Wait a few minutes and try again.

2. Invalid Sitemap Content

These issues occur when Evergreen can download your sitemap but cannot parse it correctly as XML or finds structural problems.

Symptoms:

• "Invalid XML format"
• "Content type mismatch" (e.g., your server returns text/html for a sitemap URL)
• "Sitemap index contains no sitemaps"
• "Sitemap contains no URLs"

How to resolve:

• Validate your XML: Use an online XML validator or a sitemap specific validator (like Google Search Console's sitemap tool) to ensure your sitemap file is valid XML.
• Correct content type: Ensure your server sends the correct Content-Type header (e.g., application/xml or text/xml) for your sitemap URL. If it's returning text/html, it likely means your server is serving an HTML error page or a non-sitemap page.
• Sitemap structure:
  • For sitemap index files (which link to other sitemaps), ensure they contain valid <sitemap> entries with <loc> tags pointing to other sitemap files.
  • For regular sitemap files, ensure they contain valid <url> entries with <loc> tags pointing to your website pages.
• Empty sitemaps: Confirm your sitemap or sitemap index is not empty and contains actual entries.

3. Sitemap Exceeds Limits

Evergreen imposes reasonable limits on sitemap size and the number of URLs to ensure efficient processing.

Symptoms:

• "Sitemap index contains too many sitemaps" (more than 50,000 linked sitemaps)
• "Sitemap contains too many URLs" (more than 50,000 URLs or exceeds 50MB uncompressed)

How to resolve:

• Split large sitemaps: If your sitemap has more than 50,000 URLs or is larger than 50MB, split it into multiple smaller sitemap files. Then create a sitemap index file that lists all your individual sitemaps. Each individual sitemap file should contain at most 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 50MB. Evergreen processes each sitemap file within a memory-constrained environment; a single sitemap file (after decompression, if applicable) that exceeds 50MB can cause processing failures.
• Consolidate sitemap indexes: If your sitemap index lists more than 50,000 sitemaps, consider consolidating them or checking for unintentional loops/duplicate entries.

Need Further Help?

If you've tried these steps and are still experiencing issues, please contact support with your project's domain and the sitemap URL you are trying to add.