What's wrong with this sitemap?

[catbur]

I'm stumped: https://reelgood.com/sitemap.xml

[ThompsonPaul]

There's nothing wrong with it, Cat, but it's actually what's called a sitemap index. Its job is to contain a list of the specific sitemaps for different sections of the website. The search engines crawl that index, which then points them to where each of the individual sitemaps is located, which they then crawl from there.

This is actually a preferred method for handling large sitemaps and ideally for breaking out the site into subsections so you can better monitor how well the crawlers are dealing with the different sections.

You only need to submit the sitemap index to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You'll see once it's been processed that you can click on the sitemap index link and it will load a page showing the status of all the sub-sitemaps automatically.

That make sense?

Paul

[catharine]

Thanks, Paul, much appreciated. Yes, this all makes sense, but I'm still stumped as to why our site isn't being indexed. I thought I had narrowed it down to the sitemap as the cause, but seems that's not right.

In Google Search Console, it shows 121,000 URLs submitted but only 20,000 URLs indexed.

[GastonRiera]

Hi Cath,

If you've uploaded recently to Search Console those sitemap, give it a little more time. It usually takes many weeks in order to index a big site like this.
You might try by manyally request to index an URL and its links. This can be done in the option: Fetch as Google, then ask to index and follow its links.

Also, There could be some other issue in your URL structure and/or internal linking. Tried to crawl your site with Screaming Frog, starting from the root domain and from a random url and couldn't get more than roughly 1300 HTML pages. 
I know that having a sitemap is a way to ensure that every URL is seen by google but if you dont have a good internal linking it makes it more difficult for GoogleBot.

My advise, again, be patient and wait a little longer. In my experience it could take over 8 weeks to index a site that size.

Hope it helped.
Best luck.
GR.

[ThompsonPaul]

Have you seen any further improvement on the indexing front, Cat?

Paul