I had some issues with pages on my site which I have fixed. The issue caused my sitemap to grow incredibly large. The sitemap is showing up in Google Search Console as having over 180'000 records when it only has around 20'000. I don't see a way to refresh the sitemap numbers from the dashboard. Is there a way to fix this so that the correct number from the updates sitemap will show up? If i delete it and resubmit, will it do the same thing?
1 Answer
You will need to wait for Google to refresh it themselves. They tend to set a refresh time based on how frequently the sitemap has been modified in the past. If you do not post to the site often, it may take a bit longer than others for them to fetch the latest copy of the sitemap from your web server. Whatever you do, do not delete it. I wish Google would just add a refresh button, even if it did nothing. This way people wouldn't fall into the trap of deleting it and eventually regret it. If you delete the sitemap, Google will have to do a large amount of revalidating to figure out which URLs from the sitemap are in the index and it will end up taking far longer than it would if you have of just waited for them to refresh it automatically. You will just need to wait a few more days, they never take too long to refresh it. Unless there are lots of new URLs that Google may not find from a regular scrape, there isn't much need to stress over this.
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