Why is GSC ignoring sitemap.xml files?

[KieranThomas]

Hi all,

I can't seem to find a solution to this particular issue so wondered if you awesome bunch have any ideas!


For one of our clients (and it only seem to impact this client), GSC is saying that the sitemap.xml file hasn't been crawled since 25th April 2022.
So far I've tried the following without success:
1) Ran it through several validators and non flag any issues. It passes as valid
2) Have used the GSC "Inspect" tool, and that also confirms that Google can access it OK
3) Have tried deleting it (several times) and resubmitting and leaving it for a while for Google to crawl. No joy

Interestingly, we also have another odd issue with this client that we have for no other clients so I'd be curious to know if it could be related....
We often yet a "Quota exceeded" error message even if we haven't tried to submit any URLs that day. Very occasionally Google will allow us to submit 1-2 URLs but then the error starts to appear again and can last for weeks.

The quality of the site is OK as far as we're aware in that there are no security issues or manual actions.
Some of the content is "thin", which we're trying to improve but with some resistance from the client. However, that shouldn't be why Google isn't crawling the sitemap.


Any ideas on how we can get Google to crawl the sitemap?)

 

[Justin Mosebach]

Hi @KieranThomas! You might want to try creating a new XML sitemap and submitting that to see if it works.

You could also try to delete the sitemap from GSC and add it back. (Don't just add it before deleting the existing XML sitemap in GSC.)

As for the "Quota exceeded" error message, I'd check if there are other users on the GSC account. If there are, that might be why there's an issue.

As an agency, we have a ton of websites in a single GSC login and the quota seems to go across sites (so if we submit the quota in site A, we can't submit more for site B).

I'm interested to see what happens!

 

[KieranThomas]

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the reply.

Re deleting / resubmitting the sitemap - have tried that (see point 3 above)
Re Quota - Interesting to hear it can apply across sites. I wouldn't have expected that. In terms of users, the client isn't active with SEO (it can be "challenging" to get any kind of input from them at the best of times) so it's unlikely they're logging in, and none of my colleagues are.
Also, I can submit fine to other clients even when the quota exceeded error appears for this client, so that doesn't appear to be a cause.


To me - it somehow feels like this GSC entry is corrupted but I don't know if there's anything I can do about that as even if I delete my access, the account won't change, so re-adding it probably won't work

 

[Joey Abna]

Do you have GSC access for all versions of the website including www and non www? I have not had issues like you are describing so just wondering if all versions are having the same issues.

 

[Justin Mosebach]

@KieranThomas I'd still check users. A lot of the time, I find old SEO companies/contractors still have access.

To @Joey Abna's point, I'd try verifying by domain if you haven't already. If you have, then try verifying a specific URL (Example Domain).

Has Bing Webmaster Tools had any issues with reading the sitemap.xml file?

 

[KieranThomas]

Thanks both.

Re: "Has Bing Webmaster Tools had any issues with reading the sitemap.xml file?"
Bing is being as good as gold - no issues reported and says "Success" - last crawled 9th Dec 2022

Re: "I'd still check users. A lot of the time, I find old SEO companies/contractors still have access."
Have checked. Only us have access (not even the client does) and of the people listed I know it will just be me who uses GSC as the other users are either managers or devs who don't actively manage the site but have access for other reasons.

Re: "Do you have GSC access for all versions of the website including www and non www? I have not had issues like you are describing so just wondering if all versions are having the same issues."


Hmmm. At the moment we're only using URL. I guess we could try setting up a domain level property and seeing if the issue persists there too. Will give that a try. Thanks

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Hi all,

I can't seem to find a solution to this particular issue so wondered if you awesome bunch have any ideas!


For one of our clients (and it only seem to impact this client), GSC is saying that the sitemap.xml file hasn't been crawled since 25th April 2022.
So far I've tried the following without success:
1) Ran it through several validators and non flag any issues. It passes as valid
2) Have used the GSC "Inspect" tool, and that also confirms that Google can access it OK
3) Have tried deleting it (several times) and resubmitting and leaving it for a while for Google to crawl. No joy

Interestingly, we also have another odd issue with this client that we have for no other clients so I'd be curious to know if it could be related....
We often yet a "Quota exceeded" error message even if we haven't tried to submit any URLs that day. Very occasionally Google will allow us to submit 1-2 URLs but then the error starts to appear again and can last for weeks.

The quality of the site is OK as far as we're aware in that there are no security issues or manual actions.
Some of the content is "thin", which we're trying to improve but with some resistance from the client. However, that shouldn't be why Google isn't crawling the sitemap.


Any ideas on how we can get Google to crawl the sitemap?)

Hey Kieran, we had a similar issue and I wound up seeing a timely article back in October. I was unaware until reading this article that you can easily "ping" Google to recrawl your sitemap(s): Google: Pinging Sitemaps Help Get New Content Indexed More Quickly

It worked for us with the problematic sitemap and commonly do this now after making content changes for our client websites. Hope this helps!

 

[KieranThomas]

Thanks @JeffClevelandTN - I didn't know about that pinging tool so have given it a shot. Will be interesting to see if that solves the issue in GSC. Will let you know!