The sitemap checklist most teams quietly fail

The sitemap checklist most teams quietly fail
A sitemap is a statement of intent: these are my canonical, indexable, live pages. Most sitemaps say something else entirely.
Run through this:
— Every URL returns 200. No redirects, no errors, no soft not-founds.
— Every URL is self-canonical. If a page points its canonical elsewhere, it does not belong here.
— No noindexed URLs. You are asking for a fetch of a page you asked to have dropped.
— No URLs blocked by robots. Same contradiction, opposite direction.
— One protocol, one host, consistent trailing slashes. Pick and enforce.
— Last-modified values that are real. If everything updates overnight because a template changed, the field is now noise and gets ignored.
— Split by section once the file grows, with an index file. Then you can see which section stopped being crawled.
Treat the sitemap as a report you can be graded on. Clean it and resubmit, rather than appending forever.