: When will my new sitemap be indexed by Google? I generated a new sitemap for my (WordPress) website with the Yoast SEO plugin. However, Google shows the old sitemap in search results, so how

@LarsenBagley505

What you want to do is go add and verify your site's name and url then submit your new sitemap to Google.

To do so:


Sign up with Google Webmaster Tools
Add property
Verify Ownership (upload a file to site root folder or server login
credentials)
Submit sitemap
Fetch as Google
Submit to index


After doing this I have seen sites start showing the update results within 30 minutes on the search engines.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Gretchen104

Sitemaps are not indexed by Google per se. Instead, they inform the Google spider what pages, posts, tags, categories, authors, etc. are accessible to the spider and Google will then change its behavior accordingly.

Google shouldn't show a sitemap in the search results, though (at least not an XML-based one). If your previous sitemap was an HTML page or something else that Google would treat as a document and it is still publicly accessible, expect it to continue to show up until you remove it.

Vote Up Vote Down