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Google is not reading my sitemap of my wordpress site automatically. The 'last date read' remains the same as the submitted date. I had updated the contents of my site a couple of weeks ago, and the contents of sitemap were also updated automatically. But the updated sitemap was not read automatically by Google thereafter. I waited for a week but it remained the same. Finally, I was forced to resubmit the sitemap and google now discovered by new URLS immediately.

Is this normal? Does google take weeks to read sitemaps? Or is this some problem from my website side?

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    Why do you need Google to read the sitemap? XML sitemaps don't help get your pages indexed or ranked. It is usually better to link to your pages on your site and let Googlebot find them from there. WordPress usually does that automatically for you. See Myth: An XML sitemap is needed for SEO; it helps rankings
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jul 26, 2021 at 15:36
  • I am using wordpress.org., not wordpress.com. So my website was not indexed by Google in the initial weeks until I submit my XML sitemap in the Google webmaster tool.
    – Mitu Raj
    Commented Jul 26, 2021 at 15:41
  • I was assuming that you were using the WordPress CMS from wordpress.org rather than hosting on wordpress.com. Sitemaps have very little influence over with SEO and Googlebot can crawl WordPress sites just fine without one. It doesn't hurt to have a sitemap, but it won't control whether your site is indexed or not.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jul 26, 2021 at 15:47
  • So you mean now that my website is indexed already, I just have to make sure that I have to put links to my new posts/pages in my already indexed pages/posts? So that Google bots will find them?
    – Mitu Raj
    Commented Jul 26, 2021 at 15:57
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    I don't know if your website is already indexed, but linking to every page is the best way to give each page the best shot of being indexed and ranking well.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jul 26, 2021 at 15:59

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Google usually picks up updated sitemaps within a few days, but sometimes it can take longer due to various reasons. Make sure you've submitted your updated sitemap in Google Search Console. Also, check if your sitemap is correctly formatted and accessible. If you're using a CMS like WordPress, plugins like Yoast can help manage your sitemaps efficiently.

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  • As mentioned by others, sitemaps have little effect on ranking. I still maintain them though. However I usually have a page (or more) accessed by users as "sitemap", and it either has all the pages on it (if a small site), or main headings - the pages of which have the links.
    – Rohit Gupta
    Commented Aug 6 at 8:22
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No, is not true. Sometimes doesn't matter if you link each page on your site. Google does what it wants and doesn't care of our effort to be indexed. There's no explanation other that Google has but little resources left to indexing.

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