Adding pages to Sitemap

The error seen is: "indexed not submitted in sitemap"

A common error that is reported in Google Search Console is that a page has been indexed but it has not been submitted in a sitemap.

This error may be correct or it may be just a transitional and it will correct itself over time. The first thing to do is to check if the error is correct. In that you have correctly specified the page in a sitemap and also that you do have a sitemap that Google can read.

You may also want to check the last time that the sitemap was scanned by Google. You can do this in GSC under "Sitemaps".

You are most likely to see this error when you are checking a URL or re-submitting it for indexing.

Backgound to this page

One of the Coverage reports has entries for pages that are indexed by Google but were not is a sitemap at the time of being indexed. Google Search Console gives you the option of requesting those pages be re-indexed after you have put a reference to the page in your sitemap.

The report also gives the time that the pages were last crawled.

I added pages that I found in this list to my sitemap and requested a re-crawl. What is not clear is how long it takes Google to update this report as the pages were still showing 24 hours after the request was made. Looking at the server logs for the website I can see that Googlebot has visited but there must be some latentcy.

As with new pages, there is a quota limit to the number of crawl requests that made in 24 hours. Other coverage issues included in the reports are pages that report as non-canonical, or user declared canonical.

Oh! the irony!

In the case where I was getting this error not only was the page not in my sitemap but I hadn't made a canonoical declaration. I also added the Google Analytics tracking code back.

Also before I discovered this Googlebot decided to spider the page and the spidering was not at my request from me using GSC.