Wix Sitemap Empty

Question

HI All - Hoping someone has experience on this. Recently, I noticed Wix made some kind of update and now I have 2 sitemaps in Google. One for the blog posts and one for the non-blog posts. This isn't inherently bad, but now the main site sitemp is...empty. It's just a shell and Google is finding no URLs in it, which is bad. (verified by looking at the sitemap itself) This was as of Mayb 2020. Anyone experience this? Searching on Google just produces endless Wix support articles about nothing. They clearly have their SEO down. Needing to find a solution here, as I can't generate files myself with Wix. And, I've seen a page removed and another not showing up in search results, so I know it's causing some fishy things, since Google is now reporting the majority of my site are pages not in any sitemap file. Thanks!

Adam - Wix SEO · Accepted Answer

Hey all, As Einat explained above, in the new sitemap structure the main sitemap file is viewed as a 'Sitemap Index' file. It lists all other sitemaps for search engines to discover and crawl. Sitemap Index files are built in accordance with Google guidelines, which you can see here. This new structure is better suited to support sites that are growing and have a large amount of pages, but it works just as well for smaller sites.Also, we recently updated the article about Wix sitemaps in our Help Center. Check it out here. If you have concerns about a specific blog post no being crawled/indexed, the best approach is to simply submit that post directly for indexing by using the 'URL Inspection' in Google Search Console. Read more about it here. When you submit a specific page, Google will provide feedback about the current indexing status of that page. At that point, you can ask Google to re-crawl the page immediately. Finally, if you want to make sure that Google is aware of new posts in your blog, you can submit your blog sitemap directly to Google as an additional signal that the pages in that sitemap should be re-crawled. The fact that you can submit a sitemap which contains pages that are of the same type, in this case, blog posts, is another benefit of the split sitemap, allowing you as the site owner to provide more specific signals to Google about changes to your site.I hope this helps.If you still believe that there is an issue with your sitemap, I recommend submitting a ticket in our help center for further investigation. Thanks

Billy Ferguson · Answer

Hey Adam - I appreciate the detailed response here. I think what's getting glossed over, is that his isn't a blog issue. There are nothing off about the blog posts aside from the fact that there is now a dedicated blog sitemap, which didn't exist before. And now, that Google is stating, inside Webmaster Tools that there are indexed URLs, but not included in a sitemap. Where as before, all were in a sitemap. Further, and I do submit URLs for indexing, a URL that was in Google on page two, suddenly is no longer appearing. Now I've been around I know a lot can change in the SERPs, but it's too much of a coincidence in this case. I'm worried about this happening to others.

Billy Ferguson · Answer

Hey Adam - I appreciate the detailed response here. I think what's getting glossed over, is that his isn't a blog issue. There are nothing off about the blog posts aside from the fact that there is now a dedicated blog sitemap, which didn't exist before. And now, that Google is stating, inside Webmaster Tools that there are indexed URLs, but not included in a sitemap. Where as before, all were in a sitemap. Further, and I do submit URLs for indexing, a URL that was in Google on page two, suddenly is no longer appearing. Now I've been around I know a lot can change in the SERPs, but it's too much of a coincidence in this case. I'm worried about this happening to others.

Billy Ferguson · Answer

This is good insight thank you! Thing is, the blog is not the issue. That new sitemap seems to be working perfectly. It's the other pages (the blog on my sight is secondary). I've written Wix support too, but I need a sitemap for those urls. So weird. Einat, toda for your input as well.

Blog apt · Answer

I too faced the issue few days back when I wrote a new blog and submitted my sitemap to google. While requesting the indexing of the page, the URL was not even getting discovered in the coverage through Sitemap. After trying so many options and changing the URLs, I tried submitting the blog-pages-sitemap.xml  to google and it worked wonders for my new post as Google discovered it from the sitemap and I was able to get the page indexed.I am not sure why Wix has performed this change in May, probably should write a page on this change in their newsletter.