Blog posts missing from XML sitemap?

Technical Q&A
1

My blog XML sitemap has 106 URLs. My blog has 170 published posts. Why are 38% of posts missing?

I have already checked and ensured

  • The blog handle is correct
  • These blogs are published with the correct dates
  • The visibility is set to published
  • there is a sitemap_blogs_1.xml file but not a paginated blogs_2.xml file
  • POst are published, and visible, there is NO noindex tag
2

Hey @seothomas ! This is super frustrating, but since you already checked the basics, I’ve seen it usually comes down to one of these three things:

  • Hidden “noindex” tags: If you use an SEO app (like Yoast or Booster), check if those missing posts got tagged with noindex by mistake. Shopify automatically removes those from the sitemap.

  • Sitemap lag: Shopify heavily caches sitemaps. If you published or imported those 64 posts recently, it can take 24-48 hours for the XML file to catch up.

  • Different Blog categories: If your 170 posts are split into different blog sections (like “News” vs “Articles”), Shopify divides them into separate child sitemaps.

A quick way to test the first one: open a missing post on your live site, right-click, click “View Page Source”, and search for noindex. If you see it in the code, you found the culprit!

Hope this helps you track it down!

3

Thanks for the response…unfortunately none of these are the culprit

  • Hidden “noindex” tags: The post are indexed I just pinged one in Google Search Console

  • Sitemap lag: no lag. the missing posts are anywhere between a week and a year old

  • Different Blog categories: yes my posts have multiple subcategories and this seems like the issue but checking other blog post sitemap paths they are empty. (/sitemap_blogs_2.xml)

4

Make small changes to one of the pages and see if it gets indexed within a few hours. If it does, apply the same approach to the other pages that haven’t been indexed yet. If that doesn’t work, contact Shopify Support to see if they can manually trigger a sitemap regeneration for your site.

5

Hey @seothomas

Quickest way to find the actual culprit: take 3 to 4 of the missing posts, open each in admin, and compare their publish date and SEO/search listing toggle against a post that IS in the sitemap.

The difference will show up immediately, it’s almost always the future date or the search listing checkbox. Also pull the blog sitemap directly at yourstore.com/sitemap_blogs_1.xml (and _2 if it exists) to make sure you’re counting across all paginated sitemap files, since blog sitemaps split across multiple files and you might be reading only one.

Hope that helps! If it did, a Like and Marking it as Solution goes a long way and helps others find the fix faster too.

Best,
Moeed

7

@seothomas ,
This is usually due to how Shopify dynamically generates sitemap files. Even if posts are published and indexable, Shopify may temporarily exclude some articles from the XML sitemap.

Since there’s no sitemap_blogs_2.xml , Shopify likely hasn’t generated a second sitemap yet, or some posts are being filtered due to duplicate/canonical content, low crawl priority, or sitemap caching delays.

If the posts are live, internally linked, and not blocked by noindex or robots.txt, Google can still crawl and index them even if they’re missing from the sitemap.

8

I did think about one posibility that one reply has mentioned which is the different categories but you said it’s not the problem. So you can try to look at other issues even without noindex tag such as whether canonical tags point elsewhere? Or try to look for the pattern of those missing posts, you did check the published date, so maybe it’s the template? the imported content? export list of blog URLs and compare to the sitemap, look for exact those 64 blogs and see if they have any common. Tbh, you seemed to check everything so these are few things I can think of right now