Sitemap index
<sitemap>
One child sitemap in an index: a required <loc> pointing at the sitemap file, and an optional <lastmod> for it.
Each <sitemap> names one sitemap file. It has the same two children an index entry can carry — <loc> and <lastmod> — and nothing else; changefreq and priority belong to <url> and are not permitted here.
The <lastmod> here is about the sitemap file rather than any page inside it, which is what makes it useful: a crawler that has seen this index before can skip every child whose lastmod has not moved.
- Format
- Sitemap index
- Namespace
- Sitemap protocol 0.9
- Parent
- <sitemapindex>
- How many
- One or more per index, up to 50,000.
What our validator does
Counted, and each entry is checked for a <loc>; entries missing one are reported as an error.
Broken and fixed
Both documents below are well-formed XML — that is the point of this corpus — and both are run through the validator on every test run. The verdicts here are what it returned, not what we expect it to.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>1 child sitemap(s) are missing a <loc>.<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>https://example.com/sitemap-1.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>Where it reaches
- FormatsSitemap indexWhere this element sits in the format.
- ToolsSitemap validatorReports the entries with no <loc>.
Related elements
- <sitemapindex>The root element of a sitemap index: a list of sitemaps rather than a list of URLs, in the same namespace as an ordinary sitemap.
- <loc>The URL of a child sitemap. Same element name as in a sitemap, different meaning: it points at a file, not at a page.
- <url>One entry in a sitemap: a required <loc> plus the optional metadata a crawler may or may not use.
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