When I try creating a sitemap, it doesnt crawl my entire site.
-
We just launched a new Ruby app at (used to be a wordpress blog) -
We have not had time to create an auto-generated sitemap, so I went to a few different websites with free sitemap generation tools. Most of them index up to 100 or 500 URLS. Our site has over 1,000 individual listings and 3 landing pages, so when I put our URL into a sitemap creator, it should be finding all of these pages. However, that is not happening, only 4 pages seem to be seen by the crawlers.
TheSquareFoothttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/http://www.thesquarefoot.com/users/sign_inhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/searchhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/renters/sign_upThis worries me that when Google comes to crawl our site, these are the only pages it will see as well. Our robots.txt is blank, so there should be nothing stopping the crawlers from going through the entire site. Here is an example of one of the 1,000s of pages not being crawled****http://www.thesquarefoot.com/listings/Houston/TX/77098/Central_Houston/3910_Kirby_Dr/Suite_204Any help would be much appreciated!
-
Thanks for you help, can I ask one more question -
We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app -
http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml
Which has over 1,300 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,025 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages.
Any help would be appreciated!
Aron
-
I'd worry less about the sitemaps and more about internal linking structure. The problem you are having with crawlers is as symptom of the linking problem.
Most of your content seems to be on the other side of a search form. When crawlers, including those from search engines, explore you site they are looking for href links to follow - they will not submit forms.
If then you want the other content to be indexed then you need to provide a crawl path to it. Could you add links to each neighbourhood on page somewhere so that there is path to follow? That might lead on to further questions about your url structure and use of ajax too.
The general principal is that you should link to content you want to rank. Many will argue that a sitemap removes that necessity, but links provide more information that a list of URLs and I certainly wouldn't rely on sitemaps alone to get content indexed let alone ranked.
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
-
Moving a lot of pdfs to main site. Worth trying to get them indexed?
On my main site we link to pdfs that are located on another one of our domains. The only thing that is on this other domain is the pdfs. It was setup really poorly so I am going to redesign everything and probably move it. Is it worthwhile trying to add these pdfs to our sitemap and to try and get them indexed? They are all connected to a current item, but the content is original.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Is there any problem if we migrate the entire site to HTTPS except for the blog ?
Hello guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newrankbg
I have a question to those of you, who have migrated from HTTP to HTTPS. We are planning to migrate the site of our customer to Always SSL. In other words, we want to redirect all site pages to HTTPS, except for the blog. Currently, the whole site is using the HTTP protocol (except the checkout page).
After the change, our customer's site should look like this: https://www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com/blog/ The reasons we do not want to migrate the blog to HTTPS are as follows: The blog does not collect any sensitive user information, as opposed to the site. We all know that on-site algorithms like Panda are having sitewide effect. If the Panda doesn’t like part of the blog (if any thin or low quality content), we do not want this to reflect on the rankings of the entire website. Having in mind that for Google, HTTP and HTTPS are two different protocols, a possible blog penalty should not reflect the web site, which will use HTTPS. Point 2 is the reason I am writing here, as this is just a theory. I would like to hear more thoughts from the experts here. Also, I would like to know your opinion, regarding this mixed use of protocols – could this change lead to a negative effect for any of the properties and why? For me, there should be no negative effect at all. The only disadvantage is that we will have to monitor both metrics – the blog and the site separately in webmaster tools. Thank you all and looking forward for your comments.0 -
Robots.txt - Do I block Bots from crawling the non-www version if I use www.site.com ?
my site uses is set up at http://www.site.com I have my site redirected from non- www to the www in htacess file. My question is... what should my robots.txt file look like for the non-www site? Do you block robots from crawling the site like this? Or do you leave it blank? User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/video-sitemap.xml
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | morg454540 -
Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?
Hello everyone! My German users will have to get a disclaimer according to German laws, now my question is the following: Will a disclaimer affect crawling? What's the best practice to have regarding this? Should I have special care in this? What's the best disclaimer technique? A Plain HTML page? Something overlapping the site? Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NelsonF0 -
Why is this site not ranking?
http://www.petstoreunlimited.com They get good grades from the on-page tool. The links are not amazing, but are not super spammy. Yet it ranks for nothing they target Any reason why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Online Sitemap Generator
I have a site that has around 5,000 pages now. Are there any recommened online free/paid tools to generate a sitemap for me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster0