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google search console discovered urls is too few for sitemap index

My sitemap index file does not show any errors on google search console, but it only shows 397 discovered urls whereas it should have been over a million. Wrong number

Basically my sitemap index file looks like this:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap><loc>https://www.somesite.com/sitemap1</loc><lastmod>2020-09-14T04:38:25Z</lastmod></sitemap>
  <sitemap><loc>https://www.somesite.com/sitemap2</loc></sitemap>
  <sitemap><loc>https://www.somesite.com/sitemap3</loc></sitemap>
  <sitemap><loc>https://www.somesite.com/sitemap4</loc></sitemap>
  <sitemap><loc>https://www.somesite.com/sitemap5</loc></sitemap>
  ... (614 sitemap entries in total)
</sitemapindex>

What can be wrong? Do I have too many <sitemap> entries?

Solution

  • This was related to combination of having too many sitemap files and some giving timeout errors. Search console is not good at reporting those errors with a lot of sitemaps. The issue is fixed after reducing sitemap count to 200 and making them load under 30 seconds.