My sitemaps are generated not in my root folder, so google refuses to crawl them. I can ping them from my site and it says submitted. but is it the same?
If your sitemap is not in the root and in the subfolder /myfolder/mysitemap.xml then you can only report links from that subfolder. Example: /myfolder/mypage.htm - ok /myfolder/f1/mypage.htm - ok /anotherfolder/mypage.htm - not ok May be that is your problem.
Google has stated that all site maps be located in the domain's root. Do this and you will have no problem. We have been doing this for ~ 2 years now without problems.