Short question about Google indexing of website and Google Webmaster Tools

Question

For all you who know, in Google Webmaster Tools one can submit a sitemap or **sitemap_inde**x file and then google will fetch it and crawl the website when it "has time to".

I have searched for this but can't find an answer anywhere...

In the interface of webmaster tools, there is a section for "sitemaps" which lists all sitemaps submitted to google.

On the right of these sitemap names, there is a column saying something like "webadresses in webindex".

This have always shown 0 for all sitemaps.

I am guessing this means nr of pages indexed in the Sitemap.

My Q is, why is this showing 0 all the time? And is this actually the nr of pages indexed by google?

FYI, I have a very good and SE friendly website.

However, you should know it has only been a week that I have submitted the sitemaps.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Well, sometimes it can take some time, unfortunatly it's quite random.

It happened to me once that, giving 5 different sitemap for 5 different websites at the same time, 4 was done in a week and 1 in a month...

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Anyway,

• in your sitemap, did you put <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> for the main page ?
• on the "sitemaps" page, click on the sitemap you sent and watch the url of the site map (ie: Sitemap : http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml) and see if there's any typo.
• Finally, did you try to hit the "resent" link on that page ?

Answer 2

I have had some experience of the sitemapping process. Some software programs that create the XML sitemap will deliver XML that will get 'stuck'.

Have you tried creating the simplest sitemap possible for your site by hand and submitting that?