Optimise your crawl budget with SiteMap Cleaner
Émilie is an SEO consultant for a website with several thousand pages. Her current challenge is optimising her crawl budget.
Her sitemaps contain nearly 30% error URLs, representing around 30,000 pages returning 404 errors. Although the issue has been identified, her IT team is overloaded and cannot handle her ticket.
The result? The crawl budget is wasted, at the expense of strategic pages that remain unindexed.
All the money invested in content production and backlink acquisition is effectively lost as long as Googlebot does not discover these new pages.
Why you shouldn’t neglect the health of your sitemaps
Sitemaps are a key component of SEO strategies, helping submit strategic pages to Google’s crawler. A clean sitemap prevents Googlebot from wasting time on error pages and helps new URLs get discovered faster.
Google itself emphasises the importance of maintaining “clean sitemaps”, containing only URLs that return a 200 status code. Submitting URLs returning 404 / 500 errors or 301 redirects can negatively impact the quality of your crawl budget. Google prefers crawling healthy websites, because crawling the web is expensive and each crawl must be worthwhile. Every wasted crawl means important pages on your site may never be discovered. As an SEO consultant, that is clearly not the outcome you want.
It is therefore essential to keep your sitemaps up to date by removing invalid URLs. This maximises the number of important pages Google can crawl. You can read the full documentation on this topic on the Google website.
Is Émilie the only one in this situation?
We have met hundreds of Émilies. SEO consultants who have identified errors in their sitemaps but cannot fix them due to limited IT resources and/or a CMS that is difficult to update. Not to mention the thousands of others who probably haven’t realised the issue yet. Below are some of the most common types of errors found in sitemaps:
- 404 URLs : Pages not found. They unnecessarily consume crawl budget and signal to Google that the content no longer exists.
- 301 URLs : Permanent redirects. They add an intermediate step for the crawler and reduce crawl efficiency when present in large numbers in a sitemap.
- 5xx server errors (including 500, 503, 504)
The server does not respond correctly. Their presence in a sitemap sends a signal of poor technical reliability and may slow down crawling. - URLs with meta-robots noindex
Pages explicitly excluded from indexing but still declared in the sitemap. This creates a structural inconsistency between indexing intent and technical signals. - Incorrect canonicalisation
Pages whose canonical tag points to another URL. Including them in a sitemap creates ambiguity about which version should be indexed. - Option: Convert HTTP to HTTPS
Automatically normalises URLs to the secure version to avoid declaring non-canonical URLs when the site forces HTTPS. - Option: Convert relative URLs to absolute URLs
Ensures compliance with XML sitemap standards and prevents misinterpretation by search engines. - Option: Standardise URLs with / without www
Aligns all URLs with the canonical host to avoid environment duplicates.
Based on this observation, we developed a new application designed to optimise your crawl budget: SiteMap Cleaner.
Let us explain how it works.
SiteMap Cleaner: the application that keeps your sitemaps working properly.
To help Émilie and everyone facing the same issue, we developed SiteMap Cleaner. This application allows you to clean your sitemaps easily by removing invalid URLs, directly from our EdgeSEO solution, without requiring any technical skills.
How does it work?
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Enter the sitemap URL you want to clean
Example:https://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml -
Choose which error codes to remove
404 / 5XX / 301 — you decide the strategy. -
Schedule the cleaning
Choose the day and time. Your sitemap stays optimised continuously. -
Copy the new sitemap URL
Submit it to Google Search Console. It now contains 100% valid URLs returning a 200 status code.
Simple, efficient and it helps maximise your crawl budget.
Monitor and manage the health of your sitemaps over time
SiteMap Cleaner does more than just remove invalid URLs.
The application includes an analytics module that continuously monitors the quality of your sitemaps and helps you make data-driven SEO decisions.
Each time the process runs, you can see:
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the total number of analysed URLs
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the number of URLs kept and removed
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their distribution by error type
This allows you to immediately identify if your sitemap contains an abnormal proportion of 404s, 5xx errors or redirects.
This quantitative view turns a simple technical cleanup into a real operational SEO health indicator.
Historical data is also tracked. You can monitor trends in analysed, kept and removed URLs across crawls. A sudden spike in removals may reveal a production incident, an uncontrolled catalogue purge, a server issue.
Conversely, stable numbers confirm that your processes are under control.
The application also maintains a history of clean-ups, including execution status, the number of URLs processed and the final size of the generated sitemap. This gives you a clear activity log for internal reporting, IT discussions or demonstrating the concrete impact of your SEO actions.
SiteMap Cleaner therefore becomes a governance tool. It’s no longer just about optimising crawl budget occasionally: it’s about establishing continuous monitoring of your sitemap’s technical quality.
Ready to Improve the Health of Your Sitemaps and Optimise Your Crawl Budget?
Contact us and we will show you how, with our EdgeSEO solution, we give SEO teams at some of the largest French e-commerce companies the autonomy they need to achieve their business goals.
SiteMap Cleaner, why wait when you can do it now?
