Strange Disappearance of XML Sitemaps in Google Console - Need Help!
Hello everybody,
I'm brand new to this forum and hoping to gain some valuable insights from your experiences. I've encountered an odd issue while trying to assist an online retailer with their Google Console setup.
Here's the situation: The retailer operates a self-hosted online shopping cart with multiple storefronts managed under a single admin. The primary domain is myshop.tld, which targets the en-us language. Additionally, there are other storefronts like myshop.tld/en-ca/ for Canada, myshop.tld/en-in/ for India, and so on. They are using hreflang tags correctly to geotarget the correct language of each store.
To ensure proper indexing and visibility in Google, the cart generates XML sitemaps for each store separately. For instance, there's myshop.tld/sitemap.xml containing all the US content and myshop.tld/en-in/sitemap.xml containing India-specific content.
The problem arises when I try to submit these XML sitemaps via Google Console. First, I navigate to Console > URL properties > myshop.tld/en-in/ and successfully include the sitemap.xml, and it shows that all 150+ URLs for the India store have been submitted. Everything seems to be in order. Then, to cover the Canada store, I proceed to Console > URL properties > myshop.tld/en-ca/ and add sitemap.xml for this location too. Again, it confirms the submission and lists all the Canada-specific URLs in the sitemap.
Now comes the baffling part. When I go back to Console > URL properties > myshop.tld/en-in/ to check the India store's sitemap minutes later, the India sitemap has mysteriously vanished from Console. Similarly, I then go back to the Canada store settings and now that sitemap has disappeared too.
I've wracked my brain trying to figure out what's causing this strange behavior. Initially, I thought it might be due to another Google login connected to the same website properties overriding my recent submissions, but that makes no sense.
Has anyone faced a similar issue before or has any idea what might be causing this? Could it be a random bug with Google Console, or am I missing something obvious? Your help would be greatly appreciated as we are all scratching our heads over this.
Thank you in advance for any insights or suggestions you can provide!
Best regards,
cjweb865
Ps: Another question, I have want to be sure I'm doing this right... in Search Console, you can add both a domain property and a URL property. Obviously, myshop.tld/en-ca/ would be considered a URL property since it's a specific url within the domain structure. However, when it comes to myshop.tld, I'm a bit uncertain about how to classify it correctly.
Would myshop.tld need to be it's own URL property, on top of being a domain property, or just a domain property? I want to ensure I'm listing this store correctly in Google Console, but I'm not 100% sure about the most appropriate classification.
Yikes! I just realized something pretty dumb on my part. So the cart actually generated two sitemap URLs for each store. One sitemap contains links to products, categories, pages, etc. The other sitemaps are supposed to show links to my blog articles hosted at myshop.tld/en-ca/blog/ or myshop.tld/en-au/blog/ respectively. The problem is that both the main XML sitemap and the blog sitemap have the same URL list! What is happening is the blog sitemap is broken and it's listing the same products, categories, pages, etc. as the main sitemap already does, instead of blog content.
I guess Google sees the similarities between both XML sitemaps and deletes both? That would make sense, although it would have been nice if it had simply stated that the sitemaps were identical. Nonetheless, I guess eventually I would have figured that out.
Apologies for the confusion in my initial question. Now that I've identified the issue, I just need to fix the blog sitemap to include only the relevant blog article URLs.
Ok, just fix those.
