Google Search Console & Sitemap Issue - Google not seeing my sitemap

[Marcy01]

Hello! I have a couple of new sites that I loaded into the google search console. The sites have more than 50,000 pages so I did the sitemap with a sitemap index. When I test it, it comes back ok with no errors. When I add it to the search console, google shows the sitemap as pending - for days - and never comes back with a count. It's as if it can't see it. Although, it does show the sitemap index has 6 files, and they are all there, they don't show up. When I just load a sitemap with only 50,000 pages (a single sitemap) no index sitemap, then the search console immediately sees the 50,000 and comes back with a count. I've never seen this issue before and am wondering if anyone else has experienced this? Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.

[keyplyr]

Hi Marcy01 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

It can take several days for Googlebot to crawl and show the result in GSC... and several months for all your pages to show up indexed, especially with a lot of pages like you have.

Googlebot *may* have an issue with the way your sitemap index is formatted. I don't know of a way to test that, but if it works to not use the index, that may be the better choice.

[JS_Harris]

"New site" is probably why this is happening. In the old days all of the content would get indexed on new sites but much of it would languish in the suplemental index since it did not yet have any backlinks or beneficial metrics attached. These would generally come out of that index as the site aged and strenghtened. 50,000 pages on a new site suggests it's probably not unique content either, which might also be why Google is ignoring the pages.

Give it time, the entire console works 3 days in the past as is.