Webmaster Tools showing a different sitemap

You were the one that originally added the sitemap to google webmaster, right? Did you always use the sitemap functionality from Yoast WordPress SEO or were you using something else. I did not upgrade to the latest Yoast so I don’t know if they changed the format.

What happens if you go to yoursite.com/sitemap.xml? Do you get a 404 page or is something there?

You can delete sitemap in Google webmaster tools and resubmit but you need to make sure that your current sitemap is properly listed in your .htaccess and in plugins like w3 Total Cache if you use that plugin.

Thanks Michele!

I actually deleted the old sitemap and switched to the new one. I’m not exactly sure if I submitted the other one originally. I must have. But now I’ve deleted the sitemap.xml from Webmaster Tools and added sitemap_index.xml.

Is that all I need to do? elitegamingcomputers.com/sitemap.xml still shows up. (Although in Google Chrome it’s blank and I can only see what’s on it by going to View Source) Is it a problem to have two sitemaps?

I have a ton of duplicate titles, meta descriptions and 404 errors, but I think they’re caused by my forums. And, I believe I made the right fix yesterday, just waiting a couple of days to see the changes in Webmaster Tools.

I use W3 Total Cache, where can I see if it’s listed properly in that plugin? And, how can I tell if I have it setup correctly in .htaccess?

Thanks for responding.

Best,
Brent

I did add this code to my .htaccess as requested by the Yoast plugin because I’m on NGINX:

rewrite ^/sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last;
rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last;

In w3 cache it is under page cache – cache preload.

Maybe someone else will answer about the 2 sitemaps – I don’t know why both are showing but you were right to submit the sitemap_index.xml. I only have one index showing.

Are you sure you don’t have another plugin active like google xml sitemaps or something?

I had some issues with title tags too. You can force Google to recrawl by going to webmaster tools and then under the crawl on the left you will see fetch as google. When it takes you to the next page don’t add in anything after the site and click fetch. Then you get a choice to just submit that URL or all linking pages. Choose the linking pages and you will hopefully get crawled sooner so you can get a better picture of what’s going on.

Just a note that I have had issues with the Yoast sitemap in the past. On one site I no longer use it and use BWP sitemap and it’s great. On my other site that I use Yoast, I just noticed that my sitemap is messed up when I view it in Firefox so I am going to go with the BWP sitemap. https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/bwp-google-xml-sitemaps/