Our sitemap is not indexed i Google even though it's successfully processed

[vtmoz]

Hi,

Ours is a WP hosted website. We have submitted the XML sitemap with a WP plugin. It's been successfully processed by Google but it's not been indexed in and can't be found in SERP. How to get this indexed? Will there be any low crawling of sitemap as it's not indexed?

Thanks

[Roman-Delcarmen]

You need to understand the difference between pages crawled and pages indexed. Crawling and indexing are two such terms.

• Crawling: When Google visits your website for tracking purposes. This process is done by Google’s Spider crawler.
• Indexing: After crawling has been done, the results get put onto Google’s index (i.e. web search).

Crawling basically means following a path.
In the SEO world, crawling means following your links and “crawling” around your website. When bots come to your website (any page), they follow other linked pages also on your website. This is one reason why we create sitemaps, as they contain all of the links in our blog and Google’s bots can use them to look deeply into a website.

What is Google Indexing?
Indexing is the process of adding web pages into Google search. Depending upon which meta tag you used (index or NO-index), Google will crawl and index your pages. A no-index tag means that that page will not be added to the web search’s index. A good idea for ranking higher in search engines is to let only vital parts of your blog/website be indexed.

Do not index unnecessary archives like tags, categories, and all other useless pages.

So it is very usual having a website with 100 pages but just 40 or 50 pages indexed. All depends on the quality of your pages. If your site is a brand new website it will take a few months to get all your pages indexed

Hope this information will help you

[JohnSammon]

To add to what Roman posted - I would also encourage you to set up Google Search Console to review how this has changed the number of pages indexed. You have a good head start by using the WP plugin but I would take this addition step.