Sitemap Submission Pending in GWT - Forever

[netmeg]

What (if anything) should I make of situations where I submit a sitemap to GWT (testing it first to make sure there's no errors) and it just lists as "pending" for days / weeks / months? This has happened on more than one site. Note that all the sites are fully indexed, ranking wonderfully, no traffic issues. And GWT appears to be coming to look at the sitemap every day. New pages are going in fine. But the sitemap status stays "pending" even if I remove it and re-submit it.

Just another bug in GWT?

[not2easy]

I've seen that too, when it happens I click on the "Test Sitemap" link if I want to be sure they've noticed and then let them worry about it. The interface doesn't update very quickly.

[netmeg]

I have some that go back to March.

[not2easy]

That would worry me, too. Why aren't they accessing it regularly? Do you see in your logs when they request the file, or other sitemaps on that site? Have you verified the robots.txt? (dumb questions, I realize - just looking at what I'd check into) In the Crawl Errors part of GWT are there any hints? The GWT interface is slow to update things, but not that slow.

[netmeg]

Yup yup yup, and the sites are performing fine. But GWT marks the sitemap as pending and claims that no pages are indexed.

It's weird.