A warning status means we were able to fetch the sitemap and download some URLs, but we detected a syntax error in the XML file.
What is a warning status?
The warning status in the XML sitemap report indicates that we detected syntax errors in the XML code.
To see these errors for each sitemap all you need to do is go to the sitemap URL and you can view the warning in your browser.
For example:
Why show the warning?
Normally, these errors don’t prevent us from downloading URLs from your sitemap.
However, in some cases, malformed XML syntax can prevent our tool from downloading all URLs from your sitemap.
So, we are just providing a clear warning that these sitemaps might not contain all the expected URLs in your sitemap file.
How to fix Warning status
You don’t always need to fix the XML syntax errors in your sitemaps.
Many tools (like Indexing Insight) are designed to handle these errors so that we can download URLs from your sitemaps.
However, if the total number of downloaded URLs is lower than expected and the sitemap has a warning message then it's a strong indication why our tool has not downloaded all your URLs.
This is when you need to investigate and fix your XML sitemap syntax errors.