I have been trying to get my site to appear on search, so I have been using Search console checking progress, now i'm noticing an error message Indexed, not submitted in sitemap. What does this mean and how do i resolve it?
When 'Indexed, not submitted in sitemap' status occurs, that means that your XML sitemap does not include Google's indexed URLs. To solve this you have to import your XML sitemap, submit the sitemap to Google Search Console, or you need to add some missing pages to your XML sitemap. Get more details here : https://techcrawlr.com/indexed-not-...d, not submitted in,pages to your XML sitemap.
Create a sitemap following the instructions on the internet. Upload it to the root directory of your website and select Sitemaps in the search console and submit a link to your sitemap in the form <your-page>.com/sitemap.xml Watch out for the slash at the end of the url in your sitemap. There is a difference between <your-page>.com/link and <your-page>.com/link/
This message could be considered an error, but not always. It simply means that Google has indexed page or pages that you don't have in your sitemap. So the first question is if you have a sitemap. If not it means Google is finding and indexing your pages. If you do have sitemap, you need to check if everything you want indexed is there, not less or not more than that. And if you see that Google indexed pages you don't want to see in Google's index, then you may need to take other actions, other than creating / updating your sitemap.
Make sure you include all your non-duplicate working real content URLs in your XML sitemaps. (If you can avoid it, and have a large website, I would try not adding superfluous thin content URLs.)
Site is small and all URLs are in the sitemap. I only excluded few items, as they are functional pages with no content. Since I posted it Google indexed 71 pages out of 114, so big jump from 20 at the beginning. I hope this week it will index the rest. My main problem is that search results are showing links to content that does not exist for at least a year, even though all of it is now set up with 301 redirect. I took site over and it looks like previous developer did not do anything in regards to proper indexing. They also took over from someone, so this indexing goes back two developers back (original developer probably did work on proper setup for indexing). I hope this just needs a bit more time.
https://www.warcha24.com/sitemap.xml Code (markup): This is your sitemap. In wordpress its very easy to find sitemap. Just type sitemap.xml and get URL.