I am seeing "0 URLs in web index" on 3 of my 4 sitemaps with no apparent cause.

Yeah me too, for all four of my websites. They still show up in the index though, using the site: operator.

Hopefully its just yet another GWT glitch.

...and now my 4th sitemap went to 0.

Maybe we can narrow down a cause?
I update all of my sitemaps 4 times a day, although only 1 generally has any changes, mostly additions.
I don't ping Google or anything.
They are extremely simple sitemaps following the format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
 <loc>http://example.com/page1.html</loc> 
 </url>
<url>
 <loc>http://example.com/page2.html</loc> 
 </url>
</urlset>

Anyone see anything wrong or noteworthy?

Same here, 2 of our sites did this, must be a bug

A bug? In GWT? Shirley you jest.

Can you make sure you include all the required parameters with the url tag section?

<url>
<loc>http://exmple.com/page1.html</loc>
<lastmod>2010-02-20</lastmod>
<priority>0.5</priority>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

check the google api to see if the required tags, I just made up this sample from what I remember.

I'm seeing 2 of my sitemaps at 0 as well.

Just got 1 back and is normal now, still have 1 at 0

@enigma Are you sure they're required? I thought the only required tag was loc ?

Anyone else who is seeing this problem only have loc?





[PS, are email notification of reply broken on WW?]

I don't suppose that I'm adding very much intelligence to this thread by saying "me too", but I'm always reassured when other people do this with a problem. So, me too.

My sitemaps (607 of them) all have loc, lastmod, changefreq and priority specified. Since early today the reported URLs in index have been dropping to 0 on them, one by one.

This is happening irrespective of page type, and plenty of URLs that are in the affected sitemaps are still showing up in Google SERPs.

Feels like a GWT bug to me. Hope so.

Yes I checked the api, the url and loc are the required parameters only.

How long you waited for the links to show?

I dont make the sitemap by myself but I have been using a wordpress plugin XML sitemap since...ever! No issue with it at all during this FOUR years. So I reckon that it has not to do with the sitemap (I hope!)

Well, I'm sure that I checked this out when I coded my sitemap generator but I just double checked...

from: [sitemaps.org...]

The Sitemap must:

* Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.
* Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the <urlset> tag.
* Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
* Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

All other tags are optional.

I've had these sitemaps for a year or two, they've worked fine.

@Henry -- Me Too! Thanks.

The 4th one of mine; the one that still showed "the proper" urls in the index this morning and then went to 0; is now back to the exact same number in index as before.

<moved from another location>

I have an XML sitemap which is being crawled by Google, If i use the command in google.com as site: mysitename.com it shows me indexed urls which are much and much lesser than those which i can see in Google webmaster tool as indexed. Why is there the very big difference?

[edited by: tedster at 6:53 pm (utc) on Dec 9, 2010]

I had three of my 9 showing 0 in the index.

webmaster sometimes has bugs.

as long as your traffic is not affected then it would be fine.

I have the same issue, i have 4 sitemaps
One sitemap has 1.200 indexed links and now is 0.
Hope that this will be just a bug in webmaster tools :S

Me too!

Me too!
Traffic as usual, all 0 pages are in the index
I posted earlier the problem (bug?) in the wrong thread

Still showing the zero index for me...

Webmaster central blog confirmed it as a bug

12/10/2010
The indexed URL counts for Sitemaps that you have submitted in Webmaster Tools may be showing zero (0) indexed URLs for some sites. We are aware of this issue and are looking into it; you do not need to take any action. This will have no effect on your site's crawling, indexing, or ranking / performance in search results. Thank you for your patience as our engineers look into this issue.

My GWT is back to normal. The URLs in web index is showing correct figures! :)

About 2 hours ago a second (out of 4) sitemaps had the proper number listed in the index.

Just now a third has shown up. Woo Hoo! LOL

Good catch on the webmaster central blog, Josh

It's just a temporal glitch. Google is aware of it.
Known issue: Sitemaps indexed URL count showing zero indexed URLs [webmaster-forum-announcements.blogspot.com]