old sitemap in Google Search Console

  • Resolved litp

    (@litp)


    2 weeks, 1 day ago

    We are confused about what’s happening with the sitemap for our website Lions in the Piazza. Everything seems to be in working order when we access it via Yoast SEO on the WordPress dashboard, or by going to lionsinthepiazza.com/sitemap.xml. But we have the following issues, which began when we switched themes in March 2024: 

    1) When we search for “lions in the piazza”, two results come up. The first has our current homepage with meta; the second result is outdated and the link goes to an unformatted version of our homepage.?

    2) When we changed themes, we lost our rich snippets/thumbnails for Google search results for all of our posts and homepage except the outdated link to our homepage mentioned above. (The outdated page has a thumbnail image.) Any other searches listing our posts do NOT have thumbnail images, which is a big problem for our traffic and CTR.

    3) Google Search Console says “No referring sitemaps detected” for our homepage. Meanwhile GSC shows the sitemap as submitted in May 2023 and crawled yesterday.

    Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. We’ve spent many hours trying to figure this out and are at our wit’s end!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Support Maybellyne

    (@maybellyne)

    Hello @litp

    Thanks for using Yoast SEO; I’ve addressed your concerns below:

    Everything seems to be in working order when we access it via Yoast SEO on the WordPress dashboard, or by going to lionsinthepiazza.com/sitemap.xml.?

    The Yoast SEO-generated XML sitemap is at /sitemap_index.xml/, so /sitemap.xml/ redirects to it. If you have submitted /sitemap.xml/, kindly remove it from Google Search Console and only submit /sitemap_index.xml/.

    When we search for “lions in the piazza”, two results come up. The first has our current homepage with meta; the second result is outdated and the link goes to an unformatted version of our homepage.?

    See screenshot. The first result takes me to your homepage while the second takes me to a subdomain of your site, not really an unformatted version of your homepage. If it’s not needed, you should delete the page or subdomain. After some time, Google will drop it from their index and you won’t see it in search results.

    When we changed themes, we lost our rich snippets/thumbnails for Google search results for all of our posts and homepage?except?the outdated link to our homepage mentioned above.

    I confirmed there’s the primaryimageofpage property on the homepage which is the featured image that Google needs to output a thumbnail. Since our plugin is working as expected in that regard, I recommend posting a question in the?Google Search Central Help Community?for further assistance.

    Google Search Console says “No referring sitemaps detected” for our homepage. Meanwhile GSC shows the sitemap as submitted in May 2023 and crawled yesterday.

    This just means Google detected your homepage URL via other means other than the XML sitemap. That’s not a bad thing since your XML sitemap isn’t the only way links are detected on your website.

    Let me know if you have follow-up questions.

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