What may be the reason a sitemap is not indexed in Webmaster Tools?
-
Hi,
I have a problem with a client's website. I searched many related questions here about the same problem but couldn't figure out a solution.Their website is in 2 languages and they submitted 2 sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. One got 100% indexed. From the second one, from over 800 URLs only 32 are indexed.
I checked the following hypothesis why the second sitemap may not get indexed:
- sitemap is wrongly formatted - False
- sitemap contains URLs that don't return 200 status - False, there are no URLs that return 404, 301 or 302 status codes
- sitemap contains URLs that are blocked by robots.txt - False
- internal duplicate content problems - False
- issues with meta canonical tags - False
For clarification, URLs from the sitemap that is not indexed completely also don't show up in Google index.
Can someone tell me what can I also check to fix this issue?
-
Hi Martijn,
This sitemap doesn't contain images at allI can't put the URL here in plain text, please see attached image.
-
Sorina, can you add your sitemap in here so we can take a look what possibly could go wrong? It's not uncommon that the urls within a sitemap don't get indexed. I mostly saw that with image sitemaps that over 70% isn't getting indexed.
-
Hi Jason and thank you for your answer.
The sitemap was just rebuilt a week ago, with the same idea in mind, maybe this will fix the problem. But it didn't... -
Hey Sorina,
I had a similar problem a while back and just rebuilt my sitemap, that seemed to take care of the problem for me. However, if that doesn't work for you, Google offers support via its "help articles". Here is something to look at: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35738.
I hope that helps.
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
-
Website indexing issues
My website is being indexed with both https - https with www. and no leader at all. example. https//www.example.com and https//example.com and example.com 3 different versions are being indexed. How would I begin resolving this? Hosting?
Technical SEO | | DigitalRipples0 -
Removing indexed pages
Hi all, this is my first post so be kind 🙂 - I have a one page Wordpress site that has the Yoast plugin installed. Unfortunately, when I first submitted the site's XML sitemap to the Google Search Console, I didn't check the Yoast settings and it submitted some example files from a theme demo I was using. These got indexed, which is a pain, so now I am trying to remove them. Originally I did a bunch of 301's but that didn't remove them from (at least not after about a month) - so now I have set up 410's - These also seem to not be working and I am wondering if it is because I re-submitted the sitemap with only the index page on it (as it is just a single page site) could that have now stopped Google indexing the original pages to actually see the 410's?
Technical SEO | | Jettynz
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.0 -
No index
Screaming frog spider does index pages on our website like: wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/assets/js/frontend/jquery-ui-touch-punch.min.js?ver=2.3.9 wp-content/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/assets/css/checkbox.min.css?ver=2.3.2 Is it a bad/good idea to set my parameters in Webmastertools and tell Google not to crawl pages that begin with wp/content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
Webmaster Tools vs Screaming from for 404's
Hey guys, I was just wondering which is better to use to find the 404's effecting your site. I have been using webmaster tools and just purchased screaming frog which has given me a totally different list of 404's compared to WMT. Which do I use, or do I use both? Cheers
Technical SEO | | Adamshowbiz0 -
Spider Indexed Disallowed URLs
Hi there, In order to reduce the huge amount of duplicate content and titles for a cliënt, we have disallowed all spiders for some areas of the site in August via the robots.txt-file. This was followed by a huge decrease in errors in our SEOmoz crawl report, which, of course, made us satisfied. In the meanwhile, we haven't changed anything in the back-end, robots.txt-file, FTP, website or anything. But our crawl report came in this November and all of a sudden all the errors where back. We've checked the errors and noticed URLs that are definitly disallowed. The disallowment of these URLs is also verified by our Google Webmaster Tools, other robots.txt-checkers and when we search for a disallowed URL in Google, it says that it's blocked for spiders. Where did these errors came from? Was it the SEOmoz spider that broke our disallowment or something? You can see the drop and the increase in errors in the attached image. Thanks in advance. [](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> [](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> LAAFj.jpg
Technical SEO | | ooseoo0 -
AJAX and Bing Indexation
Hello. I've been going back and forth with Bing technical support regarding a crawling issue on our website (which I have to say is pretty helpful - you do get a personal, thoughtful response pretty quickly from Bing). Currently our website is set with a java redirect to send users/crawlers to an AJAX version of our website. For example, they come into - mysite.com/category..and get redirected to mysite.com/category#!category. This is to provide an AJAX search overlay which improves UEx. We are finding that Bing gets 'hung up' on these AJAX pages, despite AJAX protocol being in place. They say that if the AJAX redirect is removed, they would index and crawl the non-AJAX url correctly - at which point our indexation would (theoretically) improve. I'm wondering if it's possible (or advisable) to direct the robots to crawl the non-AJAX version, while users get the AJAX version. I'm assuming that it's the classic - the bots want to see exactly what the users see - but I wanted to post here for some feedback. The reality of the situation is the AJAX overlay is in place and our rankings in Bing have plummeted as a result.
Technical SEO | | Blenny0 -
Supplementary Index
Hi - Is there a way of checking whether pages are in the supplementary index? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0