Sitemap errors causing delisting issues?

• Recently one of my clients received a new index coverage issue message from Google. Most of the affected pages fall into the group of Submitted URL not selected as canonical. On top of that, these pages are delisted from Google Index.

  After doing a thorough check, we discovered these static pages had a wrong canonical link, which we have since fixed.

  No server error issue. Everything seems fine except while doing Fetch as Google, I found a few blocked items highlighted as 'high priority':

  https://www.domain.com.my/assets/css/style.css?v2
  https://www.domain.com.my/assets/css/product.css

  Some other resources I found under Blocked Resources in Search Console:

  https://www.domain.com.my/assets/js/about-us.js
  https://www.domain.com.my/assets/js/jquery.bxslider.js \

  According to the best practice, CSS and Javascript resources shouldn’t be blocked for Google to understand the whole page properly. Should I allow it in Robots.txt? Anything else I can check to get my core pages back to index again?

Answer:

"Submitted URL not selected as Canonical" is saying you have a URL in the sitemap that has a canonical link to another URL. In other words Google is saying, "you're wasting our time submitting it."

So, we suggest you review the settings on whatever you're using to generate sitemaps so that you're NOT including those with canonical links to other pages.

If those pages are missing from Google's index, then it's likely due to the use of a rel=canonical link to another page. So, if you want the page indexed you'll have to either remove that canonical link, or make it self-referencing to itself.

After you've repaired that, you can expect Google will re-spider the site and the pages will get back into the index. The time it will take for Google to fully re-index the site is related to the site's history of change, importance, and so forth. It's a good guess it'll get done sometime within the next 30 days.

You can also try updating and resubmitting your sitemap, that might help trigger a fas...