Trouble Indexing one of our sitemaps

[TicketCity]

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?

[DirkC]

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)

[DirkC]

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

[DirkC]

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.

[TicketCity]

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.

[DirkC]

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