URL indexed but not submitted in sitemap, however the URL is in the sitemap
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Dear Community, I have the following problem and would be super helpful if you guys would be able to help. Cheers
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Symptoms :
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On the search console, Google says that some of our old URLs are indexed but not submitted in sitemap
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However, those URLs are in the sitemap
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Also the sitemap as been successfully submitted. No error message
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Potential explanation :
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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.
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We have a Z after sitemap time, can it be that the bot does not understands the time format ?
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We have in the sitemap only http URL. And our HTTPS URLs are not in the sitemap
What do you think?
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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
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