Have I Set my joomla site map correctly as google not picking up articles

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi here is my site map http://www.in2town.co.uk/sitemap-xml?sitemap=1

But i am concerned that i have not set my joomla site map correctly. The reason why i think this is, because i have a lot of articles on the site and google are not picking them up in my google webmaster tools.

On my old site google was quick to pick up all the articles.

Can anyone offer me any help on this and let me know if my site map should be set to show all of my articles

[JaspalX]

Seems to me you might be spending some time doing this:

I think what you want to do is:

1. Discover all the old urls that were bringing traffic
2. 301 redirect them to the relevant new urls on the updated site using htaccess (assuming you're on apache)
3. [optional: submit a sitemap to google with the old urls to encourage the crawler to see that they're now redirected]
4. [if not doing step 3, might be worth doing this as the first step] create a sitemap for the new site (I have trouble with xmap so I don't use it, would love to though since it automates things - I know many people like it) try manually creating one with say xenu or integrity
5. submit the new sitemap to bing and google
6. sit back fingers crossed
7. keep tracking 404 errors in gwt to identify urls you've missed that can be added to the 301 list

there are posts on seomoz and elsewhere that cover how to do 301 redirects in htaccess, how to use xenu etc.

good luck!

--

EDIT: One other thing to remember, (particularly if you've suffered data loss in the past) is backup - search for akeeba backup for joomla, it's free and works brilliantly.

[ClaireH-184886]

hi, how would i add the old urls to the site. there are lots of urls from the old site that i have had to change.

What i mean by this is, when we changed the site, we asked the hosting company to move all the data over, they made a huge error and because of this we lost thousands of pages of content and thousands of pages of links

If you could explain about adding the old urls and if this is possible.

Buit what i had on the old xmap was, it was showing all the content that i had, which made the sitemap look very long, but by doing this google was adding it and it was showing in my google webmaster tools, but now it is only showing that 13 pages have been listed by google instead of all the content pages that we have.

On the old site by doing this, it showed thousands of content pages listed in google in webmaster tools, but at the moment it is only showing our main sections

With ref to the coronation street, it is because we are adding this over the weekend

any help would be great. It has been a nightmare building the new site after the hosting company lost all of our data

[JaspalX]

Have you changed the urls from the old site to the new one? If so, I'd be inclined to create a sitemap with everything and submit it to encourage the pages to be crawled.

Some of the categories in the sitemap don't have any content - that looks a bit odd - (e.g. coronation street)

Also, if the URL structure is all new, have you 301'd the old pages?