Errors in XML Sitemap index

You didn’t provide a lot of helpful information, such as exactly where it’s seeing an invalid xml tag or missing xml tags, but based on the fact that you previously used a different plugin for the sitemap, deleted some categories and changed some unknown settings, my best guess is that Google is expecting information that used to be there in the sitemap, either from categories that were deleted, something that was in the other plugin’s sitemap, or else something regarding the settings you changed.

Hi, I just copy the info from the result it shows
————————————–
Errors
Invalid XML tag
This tag was not recognized. Please fix it and resubmit.
1
Sitemap: https://www.barrelleaf.com/sitemap_post_1.xml.gz
Parent tag: caption
Tag: a
————————————–
Errors
Missing XML tag
This required tag is missing. Please add it and resubmit.
2
Sitemap: https://www.barrelleaf.com/sitemap_post_tag_3.xml.gz
Parent tag: urlset
Tag: url

Sitemap: https://www.barrelleaf.com/sitemap_post_tag_2.xml.gz
Parent tag: urlset
Tag: url
————————————–
Warnings
URLs not accessible
When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error. All accessible URLs will still be submitted.
1
Sitemap: https://www.barrelleaf.com/sitemap_category.xml.gz
HTTP Error: 404
URL: /category/my-whims/whims/ << that’s the category I’ve deleted last week.
——————————————-

I just resubmitted the sitemap on Nov 30 and saw that the sitemap is produced by All-in-One SEO plug-in as far as I could understand from the info shows.

Thank you.

The issue with the invalid XML tag caused by the link in the caption should get resolved when we release the next version. It’s likely related to this issue – https://github.com/semperfiwebdesign/all-in-one-seo-pack/issues/2065

To resolve the issue with the sitemap_post_tag just exclude tags from your sitemap as it doesn’t look like you have any post tags.

The warning with the sitemap_category is clearly wrong because you can browse to https://www.barrelleaf.com/sitemap_category.xml just fine so you can ignore that, it was probably a temporary issue.

Hi, thanks for replying.

The category problem has gone, but the “Missing XML tag” errors still exist. I didn’t and don’t include tags in my sitemap setting, so I don’t know how to deal with this issue…

And I found that the number of my submitted sitemap has decreased from 5,317 to 1,016 (saw the report from Google Console).

I did make some changes in the XML setting, but only on the “Enable Sitemap Indexes,” which I still do not know should I check it or not.
I’m wondering is there an easy way to know how many URLs in my sitemap?

In the sitemap setting, I only check the “post”, “page”, and “category” box, as I did before.

I’m really worried about this in fear that I’ve made some serious mistakes. Really hope I could fix this soon.

Is there any setting that I did affects the amount of the submitted sitemap?

Thank you.