This site has both a sitemap.txt and a sitemap.xml file. The robots.txt file only lists the sitemap.txt file. We have this particular sitemap also uploaded in the search console and this is what the API returns:
{
"path": "http://www.xxxx.xxx/sitemap.txt",
"lastSubmitted": "2020-04-09T20:23:23.312Z",
"isPending": true,
"isSitemapsIndex": false,
"type": "urlList",
"lastDownloaded": "2018-07-05T05:33:51.050Z",
"warnings": "0",
"errors": "0",
"contents": [
{
"type": "web",
"submitted": "576",
"indexed": "0"
}
]
}
We also have a group of dynamically generated sitemap files for Google only (.txt and the response header returns
Content-Length: 52000
Content-Type:text/plain; charset=utf-8
along with the response date
each of these particular sitemaps returns a large group of individual URLs in text format - one per line. These sitemaps were all working up to the 2018 date and crawled frequently by google and showed updated properly in GSC. They all now show now Success status with July 2018 last read dates along with the amount of discovered URLs. The API for these URLs shows the same information with most of them showing in a pending status TRUE and some of them pending status FALSE but all with July 2018 lastDownloaded dates
Also there are several RSS sitemaps that are the same exact situation as the last group I just wrote about. All were working up to the 2018 date and all show the same similar status, etc in both GSC and the API.
A little background on the problem we were having when this whole thing started in 2018. The dynamic txt sitemaps files work by basically by an automated script grabbing a group of URLs from the database that have had recent updates and writing them to a text file. When the txt file is requested by google, those URLs are automatically removed from the TXT file and then the script automatically updates the TXT file with a new group of URLs. In 2018 we decided to try to ping google with the sitemap file each using the old ping method
[
google.com...]
when there were new URLs available in the sitemap file. During the test (it was for maybe less than 10 min) there was a bad piece of code in the script which resulted in the ping hitting in a loop. Once it was realized that this happened, the test was abandoned and no further attempts were made. Ever since that moment, this is when the sitemaps issue in GSC started. No other negative effect was seen from Google and all crawling and indexing activity continued on as normal. It seems only the sitemaps function was affected.
