Hi: I've had my site running since November, and I just submitted my site to Webmaster Tools on Sunday with a verified meta tag and xml sitemap. But there is still no data in my Dashboard. Does anyone know how long this takes? I am starting to wonder if something is not working correctly... Thanks!
You should verify BOTH the www and non-www version of your domain. If you verified the www version but it is the non-www version that is indexed, you will NOT see any data under www. You need to verifiy both versions anyway if you want to set the Preferred Domain in WMT. Also it can take a week or two for data to begin showing up in Google's Webmaster Tools for your site once it is indexed. It's not a real time tool. Certain parts get updated more frequently than others... but lots of the data is only updated every week or two. Are you sure your site is even indexed? Have you searched for site:yourdomain.com to see if your site is indexed? Until it's indexed you won't get data in WMT. And submitting a sitemap.xml to Google ONLY gets them to crawl your site and this can take weeks before they get around to it. It doesn't guarantee that your URLs will even be indexed. If you have no inbound links for them to follow then a sitemap.xml can get you crawled and possibly indexed... However, if you get indexed ONLY because of a sitemap.xml and have no inbound links from other indexed URLs from other sites then there is a chance your site could be de-indexed soon after... If you need to get indexed then your best option is to start building links and simply be patient. They have been finding sites on the web naturally by following links from other indexed sites since the beginning of time.
Thanks for your reply. I had only submitted my non-www sitemap on Sunday. Once I submitted the www sitemap, I started seeing data. Excellent!