Google Search Console Not Showing All Pages, Products, and Tags on Sitemap
During a routine check, I found that Google Search Console was not displaying the full list of products and tags in the sitemap. My website contains many pages, products, and tags, and the sitemap in Search Console should show the full list. Therefore, I began investigating and will provide a solution on how you can list all your pages, products, tags, and categories in the sitemap and have them displayed in Search Console.
Search console sitemap showing only few products.
Why should I include everything in the sitemap?
If you want your site to follow all the best SEO practices, you should ensure that all the links you want to be searchable by visitors are listed in Google search results. The best way to do this is by automatically listing all links in the sitemap. When search engine bots like Bing and Google crawl your website, they will discover those pages and list them in their search results. If search engine crawlers do not find links in your website’s sitemap, it will be challenging to maintain good on-page SEO, and those missing pages or products may not get listed in Google/Bing search results, causing you to lose traffic.
Why Was the Search Console Sitemap Not Showing All Links from My Website?
It was concerning to see that pages, products, and tags were missing from the sitemap, as shown in the image above. After some analysis, I found that my website’s sitemap, generated by the Rank Math SEO plugin, was not displaying all the links. Therefore, the issue was with my own sitemap, and Google only crawled what was included in it. Initially, I thought it was Google’s fault for not picking up everything listed in the sitemap.
My next task was to ensure that the sitemap contained all the links from my WordPress website.
How I Fixed My Website’s Sitemap
To fix the sitemap, I searched the internet but couldn’t find a satisfactory solution. I even tried deactivating and reactivating the SEO plugin, but nothing changed, and I started to worry.
One technique I often use when everything seems correctly set up, but changes aren’t reflected on the site, is to clear all the possible caches. I cleared the cache from my website’s own cache plugin, Cloudways cache, and Ezoic cache.
Ezoic leap cache
W3 Total Cache plugin
After emptying these caches, my sitemap finally displayed the correct number of links. This was a huge relief, as it indicated that everything on my side was fixed. Now, it was up to Google to re-crawl the sitemap and reflect those changes in Search Console.
Re-indexing My Sitemap on Google Search Console
To make the process risk-free, I deleted the sitemap from Search Console and added it again. After a few minutes, Search Console was displaying the correct sitemap.
Conclusion
The problem stemmed from the sitemap running an outdated cache, which didn’t reflect recent changes on the website. Clearing the cache allowed my website to show all the links in the sitemap correctly.
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