How to Audit Your Yoast SEO Sitemap Output

When you audit a WordPress site, check both Yoast SEO’s sitemap settings and the XML the site serves. An XML sitemap is a set of files that helps search engines find URLs. Yoast’s sitemap index is a directory of those files; the child sitemaps list the URLs themselves.

Compare the XML with the pages the site intends to make public and allow search engines to index. The sitemap may intentionally leave out private WordPress content. It may also intentionally omit content marked noindex or pages that use a different canonical URL. A canonical URL is the address a site identifies as the preferred one for a page. Checking the settings and sampling the XML helps you tell an intentional exclusion from a sitemap problem.

Confirm the Yoast settings

In the WordPress Dashboard, go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Site features → Technical SEO → XML sitemaps. Turn on XML sitemaps if they are disabled, then select View the XML sitemap. This is the path in Yoast’s current instructions; menu labels can differ in an individual installation.

Next, review Content types and Categories & tags in Yoast SEO settings. Check Show [type] in search results? for each content type or taxonomy you expect to appear. Yoast includes types shown in search results in the sitemap, while turning that setting off removes them. Page-level noindex settings can also exclude individual URLs. Yoast’s sitemap customization instructions describe these controls.

Read the index and its child sitemaps

The standard Yoast sitemap index is at https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml, using the site’s own domain. It should list the child sitemap files relevant to that site. The settings and available content determine which files appear. They can cover posts, pages, authors, categories, tags, or other taxonomies, which are ways to group content. The exact list varies, so a familiar set of filenames alone does not confirm that the output is correct.

The XML index has an entry for each child file. Each entry includes a loc URL, the file’s complete web address. A lastmod value can appear but is optional. Open a child sitemap to inspect its page URLs: the index points to those files rather than listing every page directly. Yoast’s XML sitemap specification describes this structure. It also says /sitemap.xml should redirect to /sitemap_index.xml; check the index URL directly when confirming Yoast’s output.

Compare the output with the site’s intended pages

Compare the sitemap with the pages the site intends search engines to find:

1. List the content types and taxonomies the site intends to expose to search engines. Compare it with the sitemap groups in the index and the Yoast settings.
2. Open representative child sitemaps. Confirm that expected public, indexable pages appear and that their loc values use the intended canonical address and site protocol.
3. Check a few URLs that should be excluded. If one appears, review its indexability and canonical settings; if an expected URL is missing, check whether noindex, private or password-protected status, or a non-public archive explains the exclusion.
4. Record each mismatch before changing settings. An absent URL is not automatically an error; compare it with the page’s settings and the site’s intended search visibility.

Yoast’s specification says each child sitemap holds up to 1,000 items by default. A large content type can therefore appear across multiple child files. Yoast also supports custom additions to the index, so account for expected external sitemaps when comparing its entries.

Investigate output that does not match

First confirm that Yoast serves the XML you are checking. WordPress core or another plugin can generate a sitemap at a similar address, and a physical sitemap file on the server can interfere with Yoast’s dynamically generated output. If the XML is out of date, clear the relevant plugin, theme, and hosting caches, then check the address again. Yoast lists physical-file conflicts in its sitemap troubleshooting guidance and documents adding external sitemaps.

A noindex response header on the sitemap itself does not indicate that the XML is unusable. Yoast documents that header on sitemap responses; search engines can parse the sitemap without indexing it as a page.

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