What may be the reason a sitemap is not indexed in Webmaster Tools?

[SorinaDascalu]

Hi,
I have a problem with a client's website. I searched many related questions here about the same problem but couldn't figure out a solution.

Their website is in 2 languages and they submitted 2 sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. One got 100% indexed. From the second one, from over 800 URLs only 32 are indexed.

I checked the following hypothesis why the second sitemap may not get indexed:

• sitemap is wrongly formatted - False
• sitemap contains URLs that don't return 200 status - False, there are no URLs that return 404, 301 or 302 status codes
• sitemap contains URLs that are blocked by robots.txt - False
• internal duplicate content problems - False
• issues with meta canonical tags - False

For clarification, URLs from the sitemap that is not indexed completely also don't show up in Google index.

Can someone tell me what can I also check to fix this issue?

[SorinaDascalu]

Hi Martijn, 
This sitemap doesn't contain images at all

I can't put the URL here in plain text, please see attached image.

sitemap-issue-moz.png

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Sorina, can you add your sitemap in here so we can take a look what possibly could go wrong? It's not uncommon that the urls within a sitemap don't get indexed. I mostly saw that with image sitemaps that over 70% isn't getting indexed.

[SorinaDascalu]

Hi Jason and thank you for your answer. 
The sitemap was just rebuilt a week ago, with the same idea in mind, maybe this will fix the problem. But it didn't...

[Asher]

Hey Sorina,

I had a similar problem a while back and just rebuilt my sitemap, that seemed to take care of the problem for me.  However, if that doesn't work for you, Google offers support via its "help articles".  Here is something to look at: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35738.

I hope that helps.