Why Is Google Crawling My Sitemap but Not Indexing Pages After a URL Migration?

After a URL migration, it is normal to see Google Search Console showing that your sitemap was crawled while many new URLs are still not indexed. A sitemap helps Googlebot discover URLs, but Google does not guarantee that every URL in the sitemap will be indexed.

The main reasons are:

• 301 redirects: Old URLs should redirect directly to the correct new URLs.
• Wrong canonical: Check whether the new page has the correct <canonical> URL.
• Noindex: Make sure the new pages do not contain a noindex tag.
• Robots.txt: Confirm that important pages are not blocked from crawling.
• Old sitemap URLs: Your sitemap should contain the final, new URLs.
• Internal links: Update menus, blogs, breadcrumbs and other links to point directly to the new URLs.
• Duplicate pages: Google may choose another URL as the canonical if pages are very similar.
• 404/5xx errors: Make sure the new URLs return a proper 200 OK response.
• Migration processing: Google may simply need more time to recrawl and process the changed URLs.

What Should You Do?

Start with Google Search Console → URL Inspection and test one of the affected new URLs. Check Page indexing, Crawl, Google-selected canonical, and whether Google can access the live URL.

Then:

Old URL → 301 → New URL → 200 OK → Self-canonical → Indexable

Also submit the updated sitemap through the Sitemaps report. For a few important pages, you can use Request Indexing after fixing the technical issues. Google recommends using a sitemap when you have many URLs to recrawl.

In short

Sitemap crawled ≠ pages automatically indexed.

After a URL migration, focus on Google Search Console, URL Inspection, Page Indexing, Googlebot, 301 redirects, canonical tags, robots.txt, noindex, internal links and the XML sitemap. If these are correct, give Google time to process the migration rather than repeatedly requesting indexing.

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