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I submitted a new version of the sitemap index for my site in Google Search Console two days ago. Soon after submission, GSC started saying that the index was "processed successfully", and yet has continued to display zero as the number of discovered URLs.

Note that my sitemap index points to about 11000 sitemaps, which provide actual links to pages.

I'm pretty sure the format of both the sitemap index and the individual sitemaps is correct.

Screenshot:

enter image description here

Should I worry about this? What does it mean?

Edit on 2020-02-03:

Google finally started displaying the right number in Total discovered URLs. It must have happened sometime in January. Why so late - I have no idea...

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  • Can you share the sitemap URL?
    – Anuvesh
    Nov 28, 2019 at 10:37
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    Sitemaps report - Search Console Help says "Discovered URLs ... If this is a sitemap index, the number is the count of all URLs in all child sitemaps." So it would certainly seem like they intend this number to climb from zero once you sitemap index is processed.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Nov 28, 2019 at 11:26
  • I recommend that you read The Sitemap Paradox if you haven't already. It is required reading for anybody asking questions about sitemaps. It shows that sitemaps don't really help SEO. They don't usually get listed URLs indexed, and certainly not ranked well. To get rankings it is better to link to your pages from other pages rather than rely on sitemaps. At best, sitemaps get you some extra info in Search Console.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Nov 28, 2019 at 11:29

3 Answers 3

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It may takes several days before you can see the results of the submission in GCS, but in case there are validating errors it may take MUCH longer if it all.

Try checking if you've get any of these errors and if yes, they should be cleaned up first https://validator.w3.org/

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the very same is here with me, problem was started from august 2019, till august it was working fine without any problem. last time when google read it there was a total number of 244000 urls from different sitemaps in the index file were showing as discovered. after that i noticed that 'last read time' was updated daily but there was no change in the number of urls as it was not showing new sitemaps in that list in the index file.

so i resubmitted that index file... and now the picture was 99% similar to the original question with a difference that total discovered urls are still 244000, but sitemaps read section is not showing any sitemap there

so now i changed the name of sitemap index file and submitted it again with a different name and now the picture becomes 100% similar to the original question, index read success, 0 discovered urls and everything else

I searched a lot on internet to solve it without any success. If i am giving an answer here that means i am still looking for it

still there is no issue with other search engines as they are reading it perfectly. So my answer will not satisfy your question but unfortunately that is a bug in new GSC as it came with lots of bugs and no one is there to solve them.

If someone has found something else its a most welcome

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Crawling is a very asynchronous process and happens in a phases over time. A successfully processed sitemap means that its content was read and parsed properly. The links specified in it and then stored in a database of URLs to crawl. There are constantly URLS added to the list and the crawler can take time to reach them. Once a URL is selected for crawling, it then get 'discovered' and passed on to another process which eventually will index it (assuming it was not blocked or no errors occurred). After that it will be 'indexed'.

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