Sitemap News Empty (WP 6.0)

  • Hi,I dont know if it′s the case but since a couple of days it seems there is a problem with sitemap news in search console. Exactly a day after I update to WP 6.0 (but as I said I don’t know if this is the problem, cause for a day and a half it worked fine).

    The problem is console says SITEMAP NEWS IS EMPTY. If I open the sitemap news url is working fine. And also sometimes console says all is correct and sometimes says that it’s empty (but able to be opened).

    I think this is causing my articles not to be crawled and indexed as far as it should (article published not more than 10 minutes to see it in google). Until publisher center doesn’t ask for feed to refresh my post are not indexed. And also this is not the first time that this happens and after a couple of days all return to normal).

    Any idea about this “empty sitemap” problem?

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

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter Raúl Amores

    (@elbores)

    I have to add that now mostly of the times I go to search console after seeing a ping of sitemaps news or after publishing a new one, I see the empty error in sitemap news.

    https://ibb.co/W3x03P9

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Raúl Amores.

    Hi Raúl, looking at your news sitemap I notice it far from empty. You’ll have to click on the sitemap in Search Console to (maybe) find out more about the error. I verified your news sitemap on https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html and it shown no XML errors so there must be something else going wrong.

    Be aware that “Url descubiertas: 0” in Search Console does not mean that the sitemap is empty. It means that 0 of the found URLs in the sitemap are candidates for indexing. This can have several causes.

    I do not notice any “noindex” meta tags or response headers on your site but the problem may be your robots.txt file.

    You seem to be using that file to prevent spiders accessing certain parts of your site but some rules may actually cause problems. For example a rule like Disallow: /wp-content/themes/ maye prevent theme script and style files from being loaded by the spiders, which can negatively impact the way the site is perceived by the algorithm. Certainly when trying to estimate how the site performs on mobile view, it might get a penalty impacting its search results performance.

    I’d recommend testing with the default robots.txt generated by WordPress. I suppose you are using a static robots.txt file? Just rename it to robots.tmp for the moment and then go back to Search Console, remove the news sitemap and resubmit it. Then allow the spider to visit the URL(s) again.

    You can use the Additional robots.txt field on Settings > Reading to add specific search engine Crawl delay rules and (maybe) the blocking engines. But I would avoid any specific rules for Google-News. Also note that if there is a spiders behaving badly, then any robots.txt rule is probably not going to stop it. Bad bots tend to ignore the robots.txt file completely.

    Thread Starter Raúl Amores

    (@elbores)

    I understand, I would delete some rules, but my robots.txt has been the same from almost a year and a half and I haven’t had problems with indexin (I have done it manually using yoast seo) Anyway sometimes Google seems to drive crazy and the next day all works fine (don’t know why).

    About search console and sitemap is empty. This message is shown when you click into the sitemap to show more info. And why sometimes all is correct and half an hour later there’s an error? it has happened today. Sometimes all is ok and after a while sitemap is empty.

    I will test..

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Raúl Amores.

    Could you try submitting a second news sitemap url: your site home URL followed by /?feed=sitemap-news … This is the same sitemap but via a non-pretty URL.

    Just to compare the result with the normal URL.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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