URL indexed but not submitted in sitemap, however the URL is in the sitemap

[ZozoMe]

Dear Community, I have the following problem and would be super helpful if you guys would be able to help. Cheers

• Symptoms :

• On the search console, Google says that some of our old URLs are indexed but not submitted in sitemap

• However, those URLs are in the sitemap

• Also the sitemap as been successfully submitted. No error message

• Potential explanation :

• We have an automatic cache clearing process within the company once a day. In the sitemap, we use this as last modification date. Let's imagine url www.example.com/hello was modified last time in 2017. But because the cache is cleared daily, in the sitemap we will have last modified : yesterday, even if the content of the page did not changed since 2017.

• We have a Z after sitemap time, can it be that the bot does not understands the time format ?

• We have in the sitemap only http URL. And our HTTPS URLs are not in the sitemap

What do you think?

[NickSamuel]

Hi there,

I can't answer all of your questions but Google literally announced we can delete old sitemaps in new search console now: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-updates-the-sitemaps-report-in-search-console-adds-ability-to-delete-sitemaps/299495/

With this feature available, there's definitely more opportunities to test a few more sitemap submissions and to verify that all urls have been crawled.

If you could cross-reference this with serverlogs you would definitely be on to a winner; although to be fair Googlebot crawling a URL doesn't automatically mean indexation!

Good luck,

Nick