: Why is the sitemap validator returning an error for the "lastmod" tag? The sitemap of my company's brand's website seems to be fine when I look at it at first glance. I don't particularly
The sitemap of my company's brand's website seems to be fine when I look at it at first glance. I don't particularly see any errors as such. However, SEMrush, the SEO tool, reports that our sitemap is not in the correct format. SEMrush doesn't tell me what's wrong. It just says that the format is incorrect.
So, I submitted the sitemap to this online validator:
www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php?op=validate-xml-sitemap&go=1&sitemapurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.photojaanic.com%2Fsitemap.xml&submit=Validate+Sitemap
It says no issues found. But, when I run it through another tool:
tools.seochat.com/tools/site-validator/
It returns several errors for the lastmod tags. Here's one of them:
<url><loc>http://www.photojaanic.com/photo-gifts/keychains</loc>
<lastmod>2017-07-24T04:37Z</lastmod><changefreq>yearly</changefreq></url>
Error 1826: Element '{http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9}lastmod':
'2017-07-24T04:37Z' is not a valid value of the union type
'{http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9}tLastmod'. on line: 5 column: 0
Could this be the reason why the sitemap is wrong? I wonder why the date-time format is wrong.
I also tried another validator. Even that one returns many errors along with the lastmod issue:
freetools.webmasterworld.com/tools/site-validator
I'm not so concerned about the other errors as they're related to video or images. That could be rectified. What I'm concerned is about the lastmod tag.
A way to get around the lastmod issue could be to simply exclude the time. However, I'd like to know why there's an error.
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The tool tools.seochat.com/tools/site-validator/ gives no error when also specifying the seconds:
<lastmod>2017-07-24T04:37:00Z</lastmod>
Are the seconds required for a datetime? There is a conflict in the spec vs. the schema:
According to the spec for lastmod, specifying the seconds isn’t required for datetimes. The lastmod element uses the "W3C Datetime format", according to which your datetime is valid.
According to the XML schema, specifying the seconds is required for datetimes (as Patrick Mevzek’s answer points out).
Per the schema, tLastMod is the union of xsd:date and xsd:dateTime.
Since you provide hours, you are not in the first case, so your string should conform to the XSD dateTime type, and it does not: you need to specify the part with seconds.
See www.w3.org/TR/2012/REC-xmlschema11-2-20120405/#dateTime-lexical-mapping for the full format.
So, if you try with 2017-07-24T04:37:00Z the validation error on this element should go away.
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