Often “Pending” on GSC

Hi,

The 5.X version priority was at 0%

Strange. Did you check the priority settings?

and that screw our views a LOT.

Also strange. Google sais it does not use priority values in sitemaps anymore. It solely depends on its own algorithm. Maybe you were victim of recent changes in the algorithm? Although they are tweaking constantly, a recent major change was in August https://searchengineland.com/googles-august-core-search-algorithm-update-is-now-fully-rolled-out-303475

Also, not giving Google News category is not the best move. We notice a big drop on News as well.

Not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the Source labels? Support for them has been dropped by Google, so there was no use for them in the news sitemap anymore. They can only be managed from inside your Google News Publisher Center account.

On GSC it often gives “Pending” instead of index the 22k links. The worst is, if I resubmit after a couple hours it shows in there.
Then hours after that, “Pending” again.

What do you see if you click through? I mean click on the /sitemap.xml link in your GSC account to view detailed information…

Please be aware that a sitemap can never cause negative effect on how your site is indexed. It’s only a tool to help search engines better (quicker) navigate your site and find fresh content. And for you to monitor (in GSC) how many of your most important site URLs are indexed. It will not have any impact on how Google (or others) view your site relevance to searches and where you rank in search results.

I’ve checked your sitemap index and different sitemaps in there and found a weird issue with the server response headers. It might explain why the search engine has trouble processing…

The main sitemap index is sent with the header Content-Type: text/xml; charset="UTF-8" which is good. But all subsequent sitemaps have Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset="UTF-8" which is not good. It should be text/xml there too.

I’m not sure why… Does this happen in 5.0.6 too?

Hey again, Thanks for the help.

So priority at 0% you apparently fixed on the latest version. At least it says on the changelog.

The problem of all that is after we update the plugin (3 days with the v5.02) we saw a huge drop on news and organic.
When we decided to go back to 4.9.4 it went ok. But it gave us the problem of “pending”.

When I click “inside” of the pending it shows the image bellow. Even tho says is pending apparently some are indexed.

Ex: https://photos.app.goo.gl/VEU4xAAz2g4FCKs57

Regarding this:
“Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=”UTF-8″ which is not good. It should be text/xml there too.”

I have no idea where do I need to change it.

Best,

When I click “inside” of the pending it shows the image bellow. Even tho says is pending apparently some are indexed.

Ex: https://photos.app.goo.gl/VEU4xAAz2g4FCKs57

I’d say most are indexed. It looks OK to me… The thing is that we cannot force Google to index pages, we can only point them out (with a sitemap or with links from other pages or submit manually) and wait.

Regarding this:
“Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=”UTF-8″ which is not good. It should be text/xml there too.”

I have no idea where do I need to change it.

It may be caused by (a conflict with) another plugin or by something in the server Apache settings. Or it’s a bug in 4.9.4…

The problem of all that is after we update the plugin (3 days with the v5.02) we saw a huge drop on news and organic.

Really cannot explain that. Did you make sure the news sitemap was working??Organic search traffic should not be influenced by the sitemap. Even if all is at priority 0 (and supposing Google secretly does still take that value into account) then it should not matter. Priority is a relative value, meaning that if everything is 0, everything is the same and no page or post is marked as more or less important.

By the way, I’ve read many complaints about a more recent “small” change in Google’s algorithm which seems to impact some sites heavily https://www.seroundtable.com/google-birthday-algorithm-update-26453.html … these are the type of things that reduce or increase organic traffic, not the priority values in your sitemap.