0 Discovered URLs with YOAST SEO

@megaelements The reason you see 0 discovered URLs when you submit sitemap_index.xml is that none of the URLs that the sitemap contains are located at the root level of the sitemap, meaning they are listed in the child sitemaps contained in sitemap_index.xml, but not sitemap_index.xml itself.

That doesn’t mean the URLs aren’t found by Google when it crawls the sitemap though. This is also why you see the discovered URL value change when you submit the child sitemaps individually. However, we don’t recommend doing that as it’s not necessary to. You only need to submit the main sitemap_index.xml file, and Google will automatically crawl the child sitemaps it contains.

Thank you for your answer, (I just wanted to figure out why or what is causing that)

as you answered that (because the main sitemap is virtual and not hosted in the root)

I went through all the threads on Google support forums and Yoast that contains (Child sitemaps and 0 discovered links) but wasn’t able to get a clear answer to what the issue is related, afterward I opened my thread here!

I wanted to know why when I submit individual sitemap (google process it properly from Yoast)
I tried a sitemap generator using URL only (and uploaded the sitemap to my root dir and Google found it! discoverd links)

which I think now these are related to (Yoast is not hosting the sitemap on the root dir it’s only virtual)

And the rest is left to Google to crawl the waiting period could be few days to never (as per the admins in Google Support Forums to other site owners).

Which is again not a clear answer I saw many other site owners are struggling as previously this process was EASY and seamless!

Is it related to robots.txt? since I added some rules to it? but why since I mereged Yoast.com Robots file and default robots.txt to prevent spam and other dir that are not usefull…

Not sure what is causing this.

What is the best practice and real causing issue for this (to make it show URL discovered the actual number of URLs)

Please answer me you’r a dev you have all the answers!

The Yoast-generated XML sitemap is generated on the fly and updated automatically when you add, edit, or delete content. As such, there is no physical file in the root directory of your server. The individual sitemaps have discovered URLs, so I don’t see an issue here. As mentioned previously, the contents of the sitemap index are child sitemaps not actual URLs of your site content.

About the robots.txt file, a basic one might look something like this:

User-Agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml

However, you have custom directives that I can’t review to determine if they’re causing issues or not. You may also consider validating the robots.txt file.

Since the URLs in the child sitemaps (those are the actual site URLs) are discovered, there is no cause for concern. You may be correct that it takes Google sometime to crawl/detect, but that’s not something you can influence.

This thread was marked resolved due to a lack of activity, but you’re always welcome to re-open the topic. Please read?this post?before?opening a new request.