Sitemap Submission Issue on Google Search Console

2025-07-15

Problem Situation

• When submitting sitemap.xml to Google Search Console, the status displayed changed from Pending to Sitemap could not be read.
• Initially suspected a malformed or inaccessible sitemap file.
• Community experts have confirmed that the new console’s “couldn’t fetch” message is a bug, and Pending remains the true status.
• To verify accessibility:

• Command‑line check

# Replace with your actual domain and path
curl -I https://your-domain.com/path/to/sitemap.xml
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

• Expect a 200 OK response.
• If you see a different status code (e.g., 404 Not Found, 301 Moved Permanently), double‑check that the sitemap file exists at the specified path.
• To follow redirects and ensure there aren’t unexpected hops, you can also use:

curl -I -L https://your-domain.com/path/to/sitemap.xml

      and confirm that the final response is 200 OK and that no unwanted redirects occur.

• robots.txt check

• If you maintain a robots.txt file, ensure it does not contain a Disallow rule blocking your sitemap, for example:

Disallow: /path/to/sitemap.xml

• If you don’t have a robots.txt, you can safely skip this step.

• XML structure validation

• To rule out formatting or schema errors in your sitemap, you can paste its URL into an online validator such as:

      https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html

• This tool will flag any missing tags, invalid URLs, or other well-formedness issues.

Additional Information

• If the error persists beyond 24–48 hours, re‑inspect using URL Inspection in Search Console and revisit server or GitHub Pages settings.