Sitemap Indexed vs. Submitted
-
My sitemap has been submitted to Google for well over 6 months and is updated frequently, a total of 979 URLs have been submitted by only 145 indexed. What can I do to get Google to index them all?
-
SF finding 'useless' links is actually part of its purpose, if you believe they're useless you should be asking why they're there. Your XML sitemap should have nothing but clean URLs; 200 response codes and not canonicalized to another URL. The problem isn't that you have category URLs, it's that those (like the one in my previous example) have a canonical tag that points elsewhere. Anytime this is the case, the URL is considered un-indexable. You can see the proof of this by doing a Google search for "https://www.interstellarstore.com/meteorite-jewelry/meteorite-necklaces", I just checked and this URL isn't in the index.
You mentioned the age in your original comment that your XML sitemap had been submitted for well over 6 months, that's where I got the age from, maybe I misunderstood?
You have no reason to not trust SF, it's one of the most valuable tools in an SEO's toolbox. I've used it for 5+ years to create hundreds of sitemaps and countless other SEO tasks with no problem in providing reliable, accurate data points.
-
Hi Logan,
I tried using Screaming Frog but it kept finding useless links, so I wrote the sitemap myself and I update it manually, I updated it only this morning. What makes you think it is over 6 months since an update?
I was told on Moz in an earlier post that having all of the category links, not just the canonical ones, wasn't a problem, is this not the case?
Every link in the sitemap should work fine, I wrote it by copy and pasting the links directly from my site. I have no trust in Screaming Frog.
-
Hi,
I poked around a bit on your sitemap and noticed a couple things:
- You've got URLs on there that have canonicals to another page. For example:This page https://www.interstellarstore.com/meteorite-jewelry/meteorite-necklaces has a canonical tag that points here https://www.interstellarstore.com/meteorite-necklaces.
- A bunch of the URLs in your sitemap redirect elsewhere or have no response - I got 13% through crawling your XML sitemap with Screaming Frog and there were zero 200 response code URLs, not good.
Both of these things combined are causing a discrepancy in the amount of submitted URLs vs. indexed URLs. If you use Screaming Frog to create your XML sitemap it's quite easy to have only clean URLs in there. You can easily remove all URLs that are not 200 status and by default Screaming Frog will exclude any URL that canonicalizes to another URL.
Also, as a side note, you should be updating your XML sitemap more frequently, a 6 month old sitemap for an ecommerce site is far too old with new products being added and products dropping off.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
XML Sitemap Question!
Hi All, I know that the sitemaps.xml URL must be findable but what about the sitemaps/pageinstructions.xml URL? Can we safely noindex the sitemaps/pageinstructions.xml URL? Thanks! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Pagination new pages vs parameters
I'm working on a site that currently handles pagination like this cars-page?p=1 cars-page?p=2 In webmaster tools I can then tell ?p= designates pagination However I have a plugin I want to add to fix other seo issues, among those it adds rel="prev" rel="next" and it modifies the pagination to this cars-page-1.html cars-page2.html Notice I lost the parameter here and now each page is a different page url, pagination is no longer a parameter. I will not longer be able to specify the pagination parameter in webmaster tools. Would this confuse google as the pagination is no longer a parameter and there will now be multiple urls instead of one page with parameters? My gut says this would be bad, as I haven't seen this approach often on ecommerce site, but I wanted to see what the community thought?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?
Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Silo vs breadcrumbs in 2015
Hi ive heard silos being mentioned in the past to help with rankings does this still apply? and what about breadcrumbs do i use them with the silo technique or instead of which ones do you think are better or should i not be using these anymore with the recent google updates?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | juun0 -
XML Sitemaps - how to create the perfect XML Sitemap
Hello, We have a site that is not updated very often - currently we have a script running to create/update the XML sitemap every time a page is added/edited or deleted. I have a few questions about best practices for creating XML sitemaps. 1. If the site is not updated for months on end - is it a bad idea to force the script to update i.e. changing the dates once a month? Will google noticed nothing has changed just the date i.e. all the content on the site is exactly the same. Will they start penalising you for updating an XML sitemap when there is nothing new about the website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK
2. Is it worth automating the XML file to link into Bing/Google to update via webmaster tools - as I say even if the site is never updated?
3. Is the use of "priorities" necessary?
4. The changefreq - does that mean Google/Bing expects to see a new file ever month?
5. The ordering of the pages - the script seems pretty random and put the pages in a random order - should we make it order the pages with the most important ones first? Should the home page always be first?
6. Below is a sample of how our XML sitemap appears - is there anything that we should change? i.e. all marked up properly? This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"><url><loc>http://www.domain.com</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/contact/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/sitemap/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url></urlset> Hope someone can help enlighten us to best practices0 -
Webmaster Tools: Total Indexed VS Ever Crawled
Ok, In WMT's under health > index status I have both total indexed and ever crawled ticked - It also looks like the data is broken up weekly. As an example say you have the following: Total Indexed: 1000 Ever Crawled: 5000 What is this say? It found 5000 pages but only indexed 1000 (20%). Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bondara0 -
How accurate are the index figures in GWT?
I've been looking at a site in GWT and the number of indexed urls is very low when compared with the number or submitted urls on the xml sitemaps. The site has several stores which are all submitted using different sitemaps. When you perform a search in Google, eg site:domain.com/store1 site:domain.com/store2 site:domain.com/store3 The results are similar to the webmaster urls. However, looking in the analytics for landing pages used for organic traffic from Google shows a much higher number of pages. If these pages aren't indexed as reported in GMT, how could they be found in the results and be recorded as landing pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edwardlewis0 -
How often to resubmit updated sitemap?
Hello Forum, I am working with an eCommerce website (not huge, a site with ~300 products and a blog that is updated every few days) that occasionally adds new products and may make a few large edits per week, if that. Our CMS can automatically generate and submit our sitemap. Over what time interval is should we do this for? Daily, weekly, monthly, etc? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0