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
-
What's the best way of crawling my entire site to get a list of NoFollow links?
Hi all, hope somebody can help. I want to crawl my site to export an audit showing: All nofollow links (what links, from which pages) All external links broken down by follow/nofollow. I had thought Moz would do it, but that's not in Crawl info. So I thought Screaming Frog would do it, but unless I'm not looking in the right place, that only seems to provide this information if you manually click down each link and view "Inlinks" details. Surely this must be easy?! Hope someone can nudge me in the right direction... Thanks....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rl_uk0 -
Merging 5 Sites
Hi there We have 5 separate sites which handle different regions/niches that we work in, and we are planning to merge into one so we have a logical path for 301 redirects. The sites have DA's as follows: Site 1 - DA 36
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben10001
Site 2 - DA 31
Site 3 - DA 29
Site 4 - DA 27
Site 5 - DA 20 Does anyone have any experience with how the DA would flow through to the new site? Each site currently relates to a different niche that we work with, and we are planning to keep the content structured similarly, probably like this: https://newtoplevelsite/site1/products, https://newtoplevelsite/site2/products and so on. That makes 301 redirects easy and also gives us more control in managing users and different teams in Wordpress. We would link the different niches through the top menu and links within the pages. Is there a better solution? Would it make more sense to have https://newtoplevelsite/products/site1, https://newtoplevelsite/products/site2, and so on? Thanks for the ideas0 -
Sitemaps and dynamic pages
Hi all, I have a gigantic website and they are adding another subdirectory to it. My question is regarding html sitemaps for better optimisation. 1. Should a keyword focussed front end (html) sitemap be made for all the dynamic URLs or 2. Should a category focussed front end (html) sitemap be made for all the dynamic URLs what would be your approach to doing a sitemap with thousands of pages with a structure like Directory > Sub directory > Subdirectory > Files
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Why is this site not indexed by Google?
Hi all and thanks for your help in advance. I've been asked to take a look at a site, http://www.yourdairygold.ie as it currently does not appear for its brand name, Your Dairygold on Google Ireland even though it's been live for a few months now. I've checked all the usual issues such as robots.txt (doesn't have one) and the robots meta tag (doesn't have them). The even stranger thing is that the site does rank on Yahoo! and Bing. Google Webmaster Tools shows that Googlebot is crawling around 150 pages a day but the total number of pages indexed is zero. It does appear if you carry out a site: search on Google however. The site is very poorly optimised in terms of title tags, unnecessary redirects etc which I'm working on now but I wondered if you guys had any further insights. Thanks again for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iProspect-Ireland0 -
Technical Site Questions
When i do a google cache of our site, i see 2 menus, our developers say that's because the 2nd is for the mobile menu - is that correct, as when i look up other sites that have mobile rendering they only have one menu visible. Plus GWT's has the number of internal links per page at least x2 what they should have - are they connected? Secondly when i do a spider test through http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/ it shows all "behind the scenes text" eg font names, portals, sliders, margins - "font size px" is shown as 17 times and a density of 2.15% - surely this isnt correct as google will be thinking that these are my keywords !? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Dynamically creating unique page titles on enterprise site
Hi, I want to dynamically create unique page titles (possible meta descriptions too) on a 10k page site. Many of the page titles are either duplicates or are missing. I heard about the option of grabbing the page titles from a database or possibly using the h1 as the page title. solmelia.com (the website consist of mostly static pages) Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Best Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com) Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Critique My Site For SEO
Hi Everyone, I was wondering if someone might critique my site and let me know what you think. I've done pretty much everything I know to do proper seo for my site. I'd love to hear some critiques about what I am doing wrong. I'm not sure if my titles are okay, being that they are similar amongst pages. The other thing is that for all the javascript buttons on the top I have no followed them since they don't have any anchor text. The way google will crawl my page is through the links in the footer. I was thinking of moving them throughout the body of the page since I hear google isn't giving as much weight to footer links. I also wanted to hear what you think about putting a blog on my site and updating with fresh content as opposed to creating a separate blog and then linking back to my website with anchor text. Thanks for all the help. And glad to be a member Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wsh150