Trouble Indexing one of our sitemaps
-
Hi everyone thanks for your help. Any feedback is appreciated. We have three separate sitemaps:
blog/sitemap.xml
events.xml
sitemap.xml
Unfortunately we keep trying to get our events sitemap to pickup and it just isn't happening for us. Any input on what could be going on?
-
There also seem to be url's which are duplicated:
/new-york-city-tickets/elektra-theatre-tickets/50-shades-the-musical-mar-21-2015-1283412.html
/new-york-city-tickets/elektra-theatre-tickets/50-shades-the-musical-mar-25-2015-1283241.html
/new-york-city-tickets/elektra-theatre-tickets/50-shades-the-musical-mar-27-2015-1283246.html=> 3 different url's - but the content seems to be identical on these pages.
You could try to do a full crawl with Screamingfrog - and check the semi-duplicates on your site (identical H1, metadescription,... and so on)
-
If I do a site:yoursite.com/minneapolis-tickets in Google I get results - so these pages seem to be in the index, even if this is not shown on the sitemap level in WMT.
I notice you use noindex on a substantial number of pages (for expired events) - maybe it would be better to use the unavailable after meta tag. See also: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2334932/ecommerce-seo-tips-for-unavailable-products-from-googles-matt-cutts
-
Update - if your site is identical to your username - the cause is almost certain related to the lack of indexable content on these pages. The event pages, while very userfriendly & valuable for end users, are too light for Google in terms of content. Apart from the title, most of this pages are quite identical (the maps, dates & prices are different) if you look at the source code.
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for your response. We have used fetch as google to test out a couple of the URL's and it worked on 1 out of 3. All the pages do have light content and I checked on the pages that we fetched that weren't indexed and we don't have any noindex, nofollow tags on the page. It is frustrating as we can see our competitors event pages indexing with no content. So any help is appreciated.
-
There could be many reasons why this sitemap is not indexed.
Are there any duplicates between the different sitemaps (if there are duplicates, they are not listed as indexed in the 2nd sitemap)
It could also be that the pages are too light in terms of content to get indexed - example - if you only list the event name, date, and place, without additional content it will probably not get indexed.
Are you sure that all the url's in these sitemap can be indexed (not blocked by robots.txt or noindex tag)- you could try a few url's of the sitemap in Fetch like google and see if they are fetched properly.
rgds
Dirk
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
-
No images in Google index
No images are indexed on this site (client of ours): http://www.rubbermagazijn.nl/. We've tried everything (descriptive alt texts, image sitemaps, fetch&render, check robots) but a site:www.rubbermagazijn.nl shows 0 image results and the sitemap report in Search Console shows 0 images indexed. We're not sure how to proceed from here. Is there anyone with an idea what the problem could be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Duplicated Content with Index.php
Good Afternoon, My website uses Joomla CMS and has the htaccess rewrite code enabled to ensure the use of search engine friendly URLs (SEF's). While browsing the crawl diagnostics I have found that Moz considers the /index.php URL a duplicate to our root. I will always under the impression that the htaccess rewrite took care of that issue and obviously I would like to address it. I attempted to create a 301 redirect from the index.php URL to the root but ran into an issue when attempting to login to the admin portion of the website as the redirect sent me back to the homepage. I was curious if anyone had advice for handling the index.php duplication issue, specifically with Joomla. Additionally, I have confirmed that in Google Webmasters, under URL parameters, the index.php parameter is set as 'Representative URL'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandonEML0 -
How can a Page indexed without crawled?
Hey moz fans,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
In the google getting started guide it says **"
Note: **Pages may be indexed despite never having been crawled: the two processes are independent of each other. If enough information is available about a page, and the page is deemed relevant to users, search engine algorithms may decide to include it in the search results despite never having had access to the content directly. That said, there are simple mechanisms such as robots meta tags to make sure that pages are not indexed.
" How can it happen, I dont really get the point.
Thank you0 -
Google Indexed my Site then De-indexed a Week After
Hi there, I'm working on getting a large e-commerce website indexed and I am having a lot of trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
The site is www.consumerbase.com. We have about 130,000 pages and only 25,000 are getting indexed. I use multiple sitemaps so I can tell which product pages are indexed, and we need our "Mailing List" pages the most - http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/cigar-smoking-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html I submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago of a particular type of product page and about 40k/43k of the pages were indexed - GREAT! A week ago Google de-indexed almost all of those new pages. Check out this image, it kind of boggles my mind and makes me sad. http://screencast.com/t/GivYGYRrOV While these pages were indexed, we immediately received a ton of traffic to them - making me think Google liked them. I think our breadcrumbs, site structure, and "customers who viewed this product also viewed" links would make the site extremely crawl-able. What gives?
Does it come down to our site not having enough Domain Authority?
My client really needs an answer about how we are going to get these pages indexed.0 -
Trouble ranking
I have a site that got messed over pretty hard by a BigCommerce issue. They used to rank but then Big Commerce had a glitch that set every page on the site to a https which was auto set, by their system, to not be indexed. This caused the entire site to go missing. It was then fixed by me, only to have the same glitch happen again. I again fixed it, and BigCommerce released a patch to resolve the issue. They admitted blame to my client and said it can take a while to resolve. It has been a few months now, and google is slowly recrawling the site. It has about half the pages indexed. The pages that are indexed do not rank at all. I was wondering if you guys see any major flags that would cause this or if it is still related to the big commerce glitch. link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
We have a static sitemap and a blog...Uh oh!
Hi We have a static sitemap and a blog...Uh oh! We are are just realizing that the 2 are not very compatible!! We need a dynamic sitemap. Is there such a thing as a "set and forget" sitemap that updates itself without us maintaining a database of sitemap data? Thanks Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Splitting one page into two
Good day everyone! If you have a page that ranks well for two highly competitive, yet mutually irrelevant, terms, but that the page will be split into two as part of a website redesign, would you 301 it to term X or term Y? What criteria do you use? Are there any other things I should do to avoid the wrong page ranking for the wrong term? I don't want users searching for term X to end up in page Y. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrep0 -
Freshness Index?
Hi, I've been a member for a few months but this is my first entry. I typically build small portal websites to help attract more customers for small business approx. 5-7 pages and very tightly optimized around one primary keyword and 2 secondaries. These are typically very low competition. I do no link building to speak of. I don't keyword stuff or use poorly written content. I know that may be subjective but I believe the content I am using is genuinely useful to the reader. What I have noticed recently is the sites get ranked quite well to begin with e.g. anywhere from the bottom half of the first page to page 2-3 and they stick for maybe 2-3 weeks, and the client is very happy, they then just vanish. It's not just the Google dance either these sites don't typically come back at all or when they do they are 100+ I was advised this was due to the freshness index but honestly these sites are hardly newsworthy...just wondering if anyone had any ideas? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nichemarkettools0