A Google employee John Muller confirmed on Twitter that the search engine could ignore Sitemap.xml files if they contain invalid URLs. At the same time, if the URLs were redirected and the content is loaded, then this will not happen. Otherwise, Google will suspend URL retrieval.
“We will stop extracting Sitemaps if the URL is invalid, but if you return content or redirect (which is recommended), we will continue our attempts. However, this should not be a problem, as a whole Sitemap is j...