Submitting Sitemap to Google

[Yongyu_Pan]

Hi all! Hope you are having an amazing day so far!

I have recently just launched my web and wanted to submit my sitemap to Google. However, the status keeps on reflects as 'Couldn't fetch'. May I know if anyone encountered the same issue? Or do I have to wait a while more before the sitemap can be successfully submitted to Google?

Hope to hear from you guys soon. Cheers!

[Nick]

Hi Yongyu, 

Nick here from Shopify. 

Great question. Once your sitemap has been submitted it can take up from 48 up to 72 hours for it to go through. It normally doesn't take that long, but that's the general time Google gives. 

Shopify has a great help guide on how to find and submit your sitemap which you might find useful here. Even to re-trace your steps and make sure you did everything properly. You can see the guide and all the steps here. 

Don't hesitate to ask should you have any other questions about anything. 

All the best, Nick

[Clodbuster]

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@Nick wrote:

.........
Shopify has a great help guide on how to find and submit your sitemap which you might find useful here. Even to re-trace your steps and make sure you did everything properly. You can see the guide and all the steps here. 

Don't hesitate to ask should you have any other questions about anything. 

All the best, Nick

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I've followed the instruction to create a sitemap but come up with an error message below and that is all I get. Help will be appreciated. Thanks

[John-Smith]

hey Yongyu Pan,

I think you are selecting fetch & render option while submitting your website. isn't it?

[Yongyu_Pan]

Hi Nick, thanks for the reply. I have followed the link which you have provided above. However, after a few days, the status still shows as 'Couldn't Fetch' in the new Search Console, and the status remains as 'Pending' in the old Search Console. May I know if you would have any solutions to this? Hope you will be able to help me with this, thank you so much!

[Yongyu_Pan]

Hi John-Smith, I only submit my site in the New Search Console, the status remains as 'Couldn't Fetch', I did not use the fetch and render option though. Would you have any solutions to this issues? Hope that you will be able to help me with this, thank you so much!

[Nick]

Hi Yongyu, 

That is quite strange. Did you submit the sitemap again? Sometimes re-submitting the entire process and sitemap again helps rectify the issue. If you have already done that and it is still saying this, then it must be something causing this. Google support has a page with information and why Google might not crawl or index some of the pages in your store which you can see here. Hopefully, that support page can shed some light on why this might be happening for you. 

Cheers, Nick

[dlevens]

This is still an issue, the current documentation from Shopify is not working. Like others have posted I get an error "couldn't fetch" and "Sitemap could not be read"

Notice that the detected Type of sitemap shows as unknown. 

[Josh_Uebergang]

Yongyu, what is the domain you have verified in GSC where you are tring to submit the sitemap? And then is this exact URL publicly accessible?

[cmorales]

If you don't mind, could you send us the link of your website?

[Clodbuster]

Sure - www.agrisellex.co.uk

[cmorales]

It seems your website has problem especially in technical SEO. Upon checking your website, it seems your sitemap.xml is not optimized. 

SItemap.xml is whole structure of your website for SEO. That's supposedly included your product pages, categories, contact us, blogs etc. You have to optimized your sitemap.xml and tell to your search engine that is your whole structure website.

Before you submit the sitemap.xml, optimize first your sitemap. It's better to optimize manually then submit to Google Webmaster.

[Clodbuster]

Excuse me - I thought Shopify was a modern, up to date platform where such mundane tasks were automatic. Cannot recall having to do that with my previous platforms.

[Jason]

If I do a test with https://www.agrisellex.co.uk/sitemap.xml I see no issues reported, or any issues with it being read.

If you look back at one of your earlier posted images I can see you've added the filename as sitmap.xml not sitemap.xml. That's more likely your problem.

[Jason]

Looks like my previous post got gated so I'll post a small one without links. Go back and check your spelling. In your previous image posted you've called the file sitmap, not sitemap.

[alanng]

https://vnizz.com/sitemap.xml

Hi all, i am getting the same error too.

it says "Sitemap could not be read"

if something needs to be done to the sitemap, what is needed to be done? i thought shopify has a ready out of the box solution for such simple feature of sitemap....

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@Jason wrote:

Looks like my previous post got gated so I'll post a small one without links. Go back and check your spelling. In your previous image posted you've called the file sitmap, not sitemap.

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[dlevens]

In webmaster tools click on switch to old version and you will see that the sitemap could be read but will show as processing. It will stay like this for about 2 weeks and then it will start showing the correct status in the new version. It is typical Google in their software is horrible and is not even showing the correct status. It is slow but as long as the url you submitted was correct it will start reading in about 2 weeks.  

[alanng]

Thanks @dlevens for the reply.

i see that on the old version, they have removed any traces of submitting a new sitemap or viewing the sitemap that i submitted in the new version.

i have a strong feeling the default shopify sitemap wont happen even after 2 weeks. but i really do hope i am wrong.

else, it will be subscribing to an app within shopify to get a proper sitemap.

[dlevens]

It looks like they finally did get rid of that in the old, at least the old showed a proper status. As long as you went to your https://www. version of your domain and submitted /sitemap.xml you will be fine. It should read in 2 weeks.

If you want to kick start it you can do this go to 

https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://www.[yourdomain].com/sitemap.xml

just replace [yourdomain] with your domain, this forces Google to go take a look. 

Make sure and load your full url to your sitemap.xml to make sure it is loading, it should show like sub sitemaps in it as Shopify puts 4 of them in there for pages, collections, blogs and products. Once google picks this up it will find the other 4, for any of the 4 it does not find after successfully reading it then jut add those as other sitemaps by copying the link to the .xml file and submitting that. I had to do this for collections for some reason. google found the other 3 but ignored my collections so I just added it as a sitemap.  

Dennis

[i0nkol]

https://ibb.co/y67jyqV

Sitemap doesn't updated since 8 days and I have 90% links discovered but no indexed..

Can you help me?

Thanks!

[dlevens]

Read my responses on this thread and give it a full 2 weeks before you start worrying about it. 

[CausticComntary]

FIXED!!!  For us the solution was simply to write a Blog so the Blog pages weren't empty.  The moment we did this and resubmitted our sitemap URL, Google Search Console went green and we saw page counts appear for our https://www.causticcommentary.com domain.

Since the sitemap.xml has four categories (products, pages, collections and blogs), you might want to verify you have at least one of each item to be sure empty sections aren't your problem.  

I didn't see anyone else talking about this as a fix, and we searched far and wide.  Hope this saves others some hair pullin' ...

Also to the Shopify programmers out there .... you might want to add some extra logic to hide the blogs sitemap page if it's empty.  I think you'll have a lot of people encounter this one and have no clue what to do since it's not an obvious fix.

[OsakaMommaStaff]

YES THIS IS EXACTLY WHY!  Thank you so much you fixed our problem.  Shopify really love the service but while Google is imperfect I really think this is a huge miss on Shopify's part to either removed the blog post sitemap entry from the parent site map xml when a blog does not exist or generate a hidden blank placeholder to avoid the GSC error from happening.  Especially considering that this is such a common problem that soooo many users are experiencing.  You all def dropped the ball on identifying the underlying cause and keep giving customers the run around on this support site about how to actually properly fix it.  Thank goodness some users have found out the truth and shared it.  This is the 1 billionth support entry I have come across and finally found the correct answer.  Please update your code Shopify to help people not lose their minds when the find that google cannot read their sites just because of a null blog....

[ECOMADDIKT]

BRO YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT SPOT ON!! 

My collections was empty, and since you pointed out that it got fixed after you added a blog. I figured to check out my collections. I set it up and immediately submitted and it got selected! 

Im guessing a lot of new ones face this issue! 

[sophiedooley54]

It doesnt relfect quickly to google analytics...

it takes some time to fetch the sitemap...somtime it takes 48 hours or somtime one week too

i had same problem with my website sitemap  ...but its been fetch within a week

[GMK]

I had the same problem with "couldnt fetch". I went to "URL Inspection" and put the homepage in, it came back with success, then asked to index. That worked. Then deleted the old sitemap.xml, then reentered it. it came back with success. Maybe try that?