Sitemap not indexing on google console? I got it to work finally

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Hello all, I’m leaving this post here in case someone else gets stuck in the eternal purgatory of Google Console as I did.

I submitted my Bubble.io dynamic sitemap to Google Console in June, and even though I knew it worked (I had used crawler bots from other services on it before), google said it had 0 discovered pages for almost 3 months, even after I repeatedly deleted and re-uploaded it several times.

After speaking to some SEO experts, I made several changes:

  1. Psge names must not have any underscores (_), instead use hyphens (-). This is annoying as Bubble.io automatically puts _ if you type a space. Therefore your URL will look like this https://unicosts.com/info_about_university instead of this https:/unicosts.com/info-about-university, which is better.
    image

  2. I updated the page titles to be longer and more descriptive
    image

  3. For pages that are dynamically populated with data, I set a backup field for the URL that describes the page, instead of my page URL looking like this, https:/unicosts.com/course/1716947874582x291140704929171650 it now looks like this https:/unicosts.com/course/bachelor-of-aviation-flying-1716947874582x291140704929171650
    image

  4. I ensured all the metadata was correct; make sure you have a short SEO description and meta tags formatted properly, such as keywords, a command for robots to index the page, the content type, the language and a revisit command. See the image for how that is formatted.

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Once you have made these changes, delete the sitemap you submitted to Google Console and re-submit it. When I checked mine, it said it had discovered all the pages about 30 minutes later.

I hope this helps. I’m not 100% sure this was the reason it finally worked, but there is a strong correlation, and it doesn’t hurt to try.

*Please note I’ve had to remove a / from the https:// of some URLs so it doesn’t format to text and you can’t see the URL itself

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