How to approach the work
Build the inventory from actual published pages. Exclude redirects, error pages, noindex drafts and noncanonical duplicates. Use full HTTPS URLs and consistent trailing slashes. Escape XML characters correctly. If modification dates are included, they must reflect meaningful changes rather than a daily automated refresh.
What to check and change
Create one language file at the domain root and reference them from a sitemap index. Link the index in robots.txt. Open every XML URL after deployment, check that it returns the file rather than an HTML error screen, and then submit it through the matching Search Console property.
A practical example
Example: the Spanish sitemap must contain Spanish pages that already exist. Copying English URLs into a file named sitemap-es.xml does not create a Spanish version. Likewise, submitting a URL before uploading its XML file produces an avoidable fetch problem.
What to measure and ask your agency
Record submitted URLs, discovered URLs and indexing reasons separately. Investigate discrepancies by page type. Ask your SEO agency to show a sample URL from each file and the corresponding live page, rather than reporting only a green submission status.
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Technical reference: Google Search Central
Work with an SEO agency
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