Try it yourself
A sitemap is the list of pages you are asking search engines to look at. This one has an error that makes a crawler skip an entry.
Which line is wrong?
- <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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Correct, and worth knowing: that http address is an identifier, not somewhere anything gets fetched from. Changing it to https to be tidy breaks the sitemap.
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Fine. A full absolute URL, exactly as it should be.
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This is the one. Sitemap entries must be complete absolute URLs — protocol, domain and path. A relative path has no meaning in a file that could be fetched from anywhere, so this entry is discarded and /contact never gets submitted.
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Fine. lastmod is optional and only worth including if it is honest — a date that updates every night on a page that never changes teaches crawlers to ignore it.
- </urlset>
Pick a line. Every one of them has an answer.
Show me the answer
<url><loc>/contact</loc></url>
This is the one. Sitemap entries must be complete absolute URLs — protocol, domain and path. A relative path has no meaning in a file that could be fetched from anywhere, so this entry is discarded and /contact never gets submitted.
The written version
An XML sitemap is the list of pages you want found →
How to check your own site for this, what to change, and how to confirm it worked.
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