[null, {"document_url": "https://sitebulb.com/hints/xml-sitemaps/timed-out-url-in-xml-sitemaps/", "unformatted_src": "/media/1860/duane-quote.png", "src": "https://sitebulb.com/media/1860/duane-quote.png", "formatted_filename": "duane quote", "alt_text": "Duane Forrester quote"}, null, {"document_url": "https://sitebulb.com/hints/xml-sitemaps/timed-out-url-in-xml-sitemaps/", "unformatted_src": "/media/1865/timeout.png", "src": "https://sitebulb.com/media/1865/timeout.png", "formatted_filename": "timeout", "alt_text": "URL Timing Out"}, null]
Timed out URL in XML Sitemaps

This means that the URL in question returns timed out when Sitebulb requested it, yet is included in an XML Sitemap.


If search engines find 'dirt' in sitemaps, such as pages that time out, they may stop trusting the sitemaps for crawling and indexing signals.

Eric Enge once interviewed Duane Forrester while he was at Bing; Beyond issues of trust with the sitemap, if URLs are timing out, it could signify that your server is overloaded or misconfigured, and may cause more persistent problems in future.


This Hint will trigger for any internal URL which returns a Crawl Status of 'Timeout', and is included in one of the submitted XML Sitemaps.


The Hint would trigger for this URL if it had a Crawl Status of 'Timeout', and a HTTP Exception of 'Response reading timeout.' 
URLs that time out may indicate an issue with the server responding to the request, or there may be an issue with the URL itself which means it takes too long to respond - such as overly large or complex database query. They may also mean that the server can't handle the load caused by the crawler, which might mean you need to crawl more slowly.

It is worth checking Google Search Console 'crawl errors' to see if they also see issues with URLs timing out. If so you may need to deal with a developer or server admin to understand what is causing the timeouts.

Once the timeout issues are resolved, check that the XML Sitemap remains 'clean.'


