Almost nobody gets XML sitemaps right

A few weeks ago I wrote about browsers removing XSLT, the feature that makes XML sitemaps look pretty. I built a small Chrome extension to keep them readable. Then I started adding checks. The extension is now called Sitemap Inspector, and it has taught me something I did not expect: almost nobody gets XML sitemaps right. From pretty view to bug finder The first version only showed sitemaps as a table you could search and sort. But once you look at sitemaps in a table, the problems jump out. Dates that are all the same. URLs that are clearly wrong. So I added feedback on the file itself, and then optional live checks that fetch the listed URLs and look for redirects, HTTP errors, noindex directives, canonicals that point elsewhere, and Googlebot rules in robots.txt. Then I pointed it at sites I expected to get this right. What “right” means A sitemap has one job. Google’s documentation says it plainly: include the URLs you want to see in search results. Those should be canonical URLs…