Google Search Console Series: Sitemaps — How to Submit and Read the Status

The Sitemaps section of Google Search Console is where you tell Google about every page on your site. It’s one of the most important setup steps for any WordPress site — and takes under five minutes. Here’s everything you need to know about it.

What is a sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs on your website along with metadata like when each page was last updated and how often it changes. It’s essentially a map you hand to Google’s crawler so it knows exactly what to crawl and index.

The RankAlSEO plugin generates and maintains your sitemap automatically. Every time you publish or update a post, the sitemap updates and pings Google. Your sitemap is available at: yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

If your sitemap shows a 404, see our guide: WordPress Sitemap Returns 404 After Installing RankAl SEO? Here’s the Fix

How to submit your sitemap

1. Go to Google Search Console → Indexing → Sitemaps
2. In the “Add a new sitemap” field, type sitemap.xml
3. Click Submit

That’s it. Google will immediately attempt to fetch and parse it. For a full walkthrough see: How to Submit Your WordPress Sitemap to Google Search Console

Reading the sitemap status

After submitting, the Sitemaps page shows a table with your submitted sitemaps and their status:

Success ✓

Google successfully fetched and parsed your sitemap. The “Discovered URLs” column shows how many URLs were found. This is what you want to see.

Couldn’t fetch

Google tried to download your sitemap but failed. Check that yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml is publicly accessible, your server isn’t blocking Googlebot, and the URL isn’t redirecting incorrectly.

Has errors / Has warnings

The sitemap was fetched but contains issues. Click into it to see the specific errors. Common ones include malformed XML (usually caused by a plugin outputting errors before the XML declaration), URLs returning 404, or URLs blocked by robots.txt.

Understanding “Discovered” vs “Indexed” URLs

The sitemap report shows Discovered URLs — the number of URLs Google found in your sitemap. This is not the same as indexed. Discovered means Google knows these URLs exist. Indexed means Google has actually crawled and added them to its index.

The difference between your Discovered and Indexed counts is normal — Google won’t index every URL in your sitemap, especially low-quality or thin pages. A healthy site typically has 70–90% of its submitted URLs indexed.

The RankAlSEO sitemap structure

The RankAlSEO plugin generates a sitemap index — a master sitemap that points to multiple sub-sitemaps:

sitemap.xml              ← Submit this one to Search Console
  ├── post-sitemap.xml   ← All blog posts
  ├── page-sitemap.xml   ← All pages
  └── category-sitemap.xml  ← Category archives

You only need to submit the top-level sitemap.xml — Google follows it and discovers all the sub-sitemaps automatically.

What gets included in the sitemap?

The RankAlSEO plugin automatically excludes pages set to noindex from the sitemap. This is correct behaviour — you don’t want to tell Google about pages you’ve told it to ignore. Pages excluded from the sitemap include:

• Pages manually set to noindex in the RankAlSEO plugin per-page settings
• Password-protected pages
• Draft and private posts
• Content types set to noindex in RankAlSEO plugin → Settings → Content Types

How often does Google re-read the sitemap?

Google re-reads your sitemap on its own schedule — typically every few days to a week for established sites, less often for new or low-traffic sites. The RankAlSEO plugin also pings Google automatically on every publish and update, which signals Google to re-crawl your sitemap sooner.

Should you add your sitemap to robots.txt?

Yes — adding a Sitemap directive to your robots.txt helps search engines discover it even if you haven’t submitted it manually. Add this line to your robots.txt:

Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

You can generate a correct robots.txt using the free RankAlSEO Robots.txt Generator.

Action steps

1. Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml — confirm it loads
2. Go to Search Console → Sitemaps → submit sitemap.xml
3. Check the status shows “Success”
4. Note the Discovered URLs count — does it match your expected number of pages?
5. Add Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to your robots.txt

Next in this series: URL Inspection — how to diagnose any single page and request priority indexing.