Submitting Your Sitemap

How to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console to start getting indexed.

Introduction

When going live with a new site and you're looking to get indexed by Google, the best starting point is to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results.

Submitting Sitemap

Google provides a guide on Submitting your Sitemap to Google which is a great starting point.

You should index either /sitemap.xml or if you're using multiple sitemaps, add /sitemap_index.xml.

Requesting Indexing

It's important to know that submitting your sitemap does not guarantee that all your pages will be indexed and that it may take some time for Google to crawl and index your pages.

To speed up the process, you can use the URL Inspection Tool to request indexing of a specific URL.

In some cases you may want to expedite the indexing process, for this, you can try out my free open-source tool Request Indexing.

Sitemap Error

When submitting a sitemap for the first time you may get see "Error". This is because Google previously crawled your site for a sitemap and found nothing.

When encountering this it's best to wait a few days and see if the error resolves itself. If not, you can try resubmitting the sitemap or making a GitHub Issue.

Did this page help you?