Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.
Since you have already submitted your sub-sitemaps, then you won’t need to submit your main sitemap index as the links inside were already submitted from them.
If you wanted to submit the /sitemap_index.xml, then you may need to remove all of your sub-sitemaps and resubmit your main sitemap only:
https://rankmath.com/kb/submit-sitemap-to-google/
Hope that helps.
Thank you.
Hello Reinelle,
Thanks for the response. But that’s not the answer I expected.
At first, I submitted only the main sitemap XML file and noticed the discovered pages are 0.
then later I submitted sub sitemap XML files and they counted the pages.
I needed to know why the main sitemap XML file reads as 0.
better to submit only the main XML file since when pages are growing sub sitempas will increase and I have to manually add them to the GSC.
So better we find the solution for discovering all sub-sitemaps from the main sitemap and discover pages from them.
hope you understand.
Thank you!
Hello,
The Discovered URLs of a sitemap refer to the number of URLs Google finds through the sitemap. The sitemaps only act as a guide, but it’s left to Google to decide whether to use them.
When the count of the Discovered URLs is zero, it means Google didn’t use the sitemap to find the URLs.
Based on that, this means that Google used the second sitemap to find the URLs. At this point, this behavior is not controlled by us but is completely up to Google.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need my assistance with anything else.
Thank you for the explanation, sometimes google is hard to understand, I guess this can be closed.
Hello,
Glad that helped.
Please feel free to reach out to us again in case you need any other assistance.
We are here to help.
Thank you.
