I need an XML sitemap expert for 5 minutes!
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Hi all!
I'm hoping that someone with a lot of experience with XML sitemaps can help me out here...
When submitting my sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, these are the results:
2,414,714 Submitted
34,721 IndexedAnd there's also tonnes of warnings.
Would anyone be able to take a quick look at these sitemaps to perhaps advise me on what's going wrong there? These do not load without the www, not sure if this is an issue?
http://www.eumom.ie/sitemap.xml
http://www.eumom.ie/sitemap.xml.gzThanks everyone in advance!!
Gavin
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Few rules about sitemaps;
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You should only include in them pages you also want crawled and indexed
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They should not contain URLs with 404s or blocked by robots.txt
My guess is there are too many URLs in the sitemaps, since I'd guess the website is not over 2 million actual "real" pages,
Also, I randomly clicked on a URL in one of the sitemaps and it 404'd;
http://www.eumom.ie/forums/topic/oakhill-school-leopardstown-/
This is probably causing a lot of the errors you see. It's honestly not a 5 minute fix - but if it were my site, I would be using the Yoast SEO plugin and using the sitemap feature within Yoast. It makes it very easy to include / exclude certain pages and updated automatically etc.
I think there must be a way to tell your plugin what to include / exclude from the sitemap but I don't have as much experience with it.
But generally - only include pages you want crawled and indexed. Don't include pages that 404.
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Hi all,
Many thanks for your input so far, much appreciated!
The sitemaps that you are seeing actually were generated using that plugin you mentioned. Formatting-wise, do you see anything wrong with the sitemaps?
Thanks!!
Gavin -
I couldn't agree more altecdesign!
http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ all the way!
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That XML sitemap you linked too is formatted in an odd way. I noticed the site you are generating the xml sitemap for is based in wordpress. There is a really solid sitemap plugin you could use to generate your XML and submit to google instead of the current plugin you are using: http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
I've used that plugnin numerous times and submitted sitemaps to google with no errors. Hopefully that helps you out.
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