Sitemap issues 19 warnings
-
Hi Guys
I seem to be having a lot of sitemap issues.
1. I have 3 top level domains, all with the co.nz sitemap that was submitted
2. I'm in the midst of a site re-design so I'm unsure if I should be updating these now or when the new site goes live (in two weeks)
3. I have 19 warnings from GWT for the co.nz site and they gave me 3 examples looks like 404 errors however I'm not too sure and a bit green on my behalf to find out where the issues are and how to fix them. (it is also showing that 95 pages submitted and only 53 were indexed)
4. I generated recently 2 sitemaps for .com and com.au submitted these both to google and when i create i still see the co.nz sitemap
Would love some guidance around this.
Thanks
-
Glad it was useful!
-
Oh you are a genius yourself Bob Thanks for the great information!
I will look into this and let you know how I go, thanks a bunch you have really helped me move this along and weed out all the confusion!
-
Hi Justin,
In that case I would ask your developer to make the sitemap on the website update automatically (or generate a new one every day). And submit that link to webmaster tools. If he's a real genius he could add your blog pages from Wordpress to this sitemap aswell but I'm not sure if Wordpress has a hook for this.
Alternative options:
- Let him make the automatically updated sitemap for the custom part of the website and use this combined with the sitemap from the yoast plugin. You can upload both separated in Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure both got their own URL. In this case it’s all automated and is just as good as the previous method.
- Keep on updating your sitemap manually. Just make sure you don't use the yoast sitemap and include the blogposts in your sitemap from screaming frog since this would give double input. If you choose to refresh your sitemap manually I would disable the sitemap within the Yoast plugin and use the Screaming frog sitemap which should include your blog pages aswell.
Good luck and let me know if this works for you!
-
Thanks a lot Dirk, your help has been tremendous to my SEO efforts!!!
-
Hi Bob
Thanks alot for your response!
That makes a lot of sense. We use Wordpress only for the blog, but the main site is custom built and doesn't have an yoast plugin.
So I'm not sure how that will work, when I create the site map with screaming frog do I need to include the blog pages in screaming frog if I'm using the yoast plugin?
Thanks again for your help!
-
Yep - you'll have to upload the file to the server first.
Bob's suggestion to generate the sitemap via the Yoast plugin is an excellent idea.
rgds
Dirk
-
Hi Justin,
Thanks for the screenshots. Dirk's suggestion about screaming frog should be really helpful. This should give you an insight in the true 404 errors that a bot can encounter while crawling through your internal site structure.
Based on what I see I think your main problem is the manual updated sitemap. Whenever you change a page, add a new one or mix up some categories those changes won't apply to your sitemap. This creates a 404 error while those pages aren't linked to from your website and (without a sitemap) wouldn't give any 404 error messages in Google Webmaster Tools.
I saw you were using SEO by Yoast already, I suggest using their sitemap functionality. That should resolve the problem and save you work in the future since there is no need to manually update your sitemap again.
Let me know if this works!
-
Hi Justin,
Could you post a screenshot of the error message and any links pointing to this URL? This way we can identify what pages return a 404. If this are important pages on your website I would fix it right now, if it however are pages you don’t use or your visitors rarely see I would make sure you pick this up with the redesign. No point in fixing this now if things will change in the near future. Besides that, sitemaps help you get your website indexed, releasing this two weeks earlier won’t make a big difference for the number of indexed pages since you won’t change your internal link structure and website authority (both help you get more pages indexed).
About your last point, could you provide me with a screenshot of this as well? When I check zenory.com/sitemap.xml I find the .com sitemap, so that part seems fine.
_PS. I would suggest you change your update frequency in your sitemap. It now states monthly, it’s probably a good idea to set this much faster since there is a blog on your website as well. At the moment you are giving Google hints to only crawl your website a few times a month. Keep in mind that you can give different parts of your website a different change frequency. For example, I give pages with user generated content a much higher change frequency then pages we need to update manually. _
-
Hi Justin,
Are the url's going to change when you update the design? If they are not changing you can already update now.
It's not really abnormal to have only a certain % of the sitemap indexed - it could be that Google judges that a certain number of pages is too light in content to be indexed. 55% of url's indexed seems rather low.
Sitemap errors - check the url's that are listed as errors. If I am not mistaken, you use an external tool to generate the sitemaps. It could be that this tools puts all the internal links in the the sitemap; regardless of their status (200, 301, 404) - normally only url's with status 200 should be put in the sitemap. Check the configuration of the tool you use & see if you can only add url's with status 200. Alternatively, you can check the internal linking on your site & make sure that no links exist to 404 pages (Screaming Frog is the tool to use - it can also generate the sitemap).
For the wrong sitemap- as your sites are exact duplicates, probably hosted on the same server, it could be that the .co.nz sitemap overwrites the .com sitemap , as they have the same name. You could rename your sitemap like sitemap_au.xml, sitemap_us.xml & sitemap_nz.xml. This way, if you add a new sitemap for .nz it will not overwrite the .com version. You submit these to Google & you delete the old ones (both on the server & in Google WMT).
Hope this helps.
Dirk
PS. If your design is also changing the url's - don't forget to put redirects in place that lead the old to the new url's.
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
-
Crawl anamoly issue on Search Console
Has anyone checked the crwal anamoly issue under the index section on Search console? We recently move to a new site and I'm seeing a huge list of excluded urls which are classified as crawl anamoly (they all lead to 404 page). Does anyone know that if we need to 301 redirect all the links? Is there any other smarter/ more efficiently way to deal with them like set up canonical link (I thought that's what they're used for isn't it?) Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | greenshinenewenergy0 -
Duplicate Content issue in Magento
I am getting duplicate content issue because of the following product URL in my Magento store. http://www.sitename.com/index.php/sports-nutritions/carbohydrates http://www.sitename.com/sports-nutritions/carbohydrates Please can someone guide me on how to solve it. Thanks Guys
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | webteamBlackburn0 -
Want to know Best Method to fix keyword cannibalization issue?
I have a website that has been experiencing keyword cannibalization issue since last 2-3 months. We have one main key search term to bring our website TOP ranking, but we have been seeing our website’s 2 different pages ranking strangely sometime for 1st page& sometime for 2nd page that one main key search term. As e.g.:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Aman_123
our main key search term 1st page rank sometime instead 2nd page
our main key search term 2nd page rank sometime instead page I am looking for best solution here to get this fixed..0 -
HELP: What happened to my rankings? No warning from google how to know if i was penalised?
Hi Guys I have just completely a site re-design, I have 3 top level domains. I have no idea whats causing the drop in ranking. I have changed the title tags and meta tags to improve them and make them better, as the last ones weren't really doing us justice. But I see now it has actually dropped our main keyword. I read somewhere that i had to completed **site search **to check and I don't see our home page showing. I was ranking for the keyword: "online psychics" for over 4months at #6 and now is not showing anywhere in the top 50 keywords. I'm also affraid I can not find our other keyword "online psychic readings" which we were ranked #11 seems to have dropped to #44 I have no idea why this would be the case. Our new home page shows a better user experience and also added more content, unqiue content at that - our last design was content thin so I have no idea why we have dropped so much in rankings. The site is also new about 6months new. I have checked WMT and have not received any warnings of any penalties as such, unless it is still coming? Does anyone have any suggestions here? Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
Website not listing in google - screaming frog shows 500 error? What could the issue be?
Hey, http://www.interconnect.org.uk/ - the site seems to load fine, but for some reason the site is not getting indexed. I tried running the site on screaming frog, and it gives a 500 error code, which suggests it can't access the site? I'm guessing this is the same problem google is having, do you have any ideas as to why this may be and how I can rectify this? Thanks, Andrew
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Heehaw0 -
Partial Sitemaps Impact on SERP
I have a website having 20 different categories. But have the sitemap for only 1 category and rest 19 categories will not have the sitemaps will this have an impact on the search results on not
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seosogo0 -
Penguin issues
Hello everyone, I run about 10 sites and pretty much every single one got hit by Penguin (the traffic plummeted on 24th April). I have never done reciprocal links (except 1 domain upto 2005 or so), I have never bought links, I have never spammed message boards or anything like that (except 1 different domain got hit by negative SEO by someone else) and I have never employed anyone to do any of the above. The way I have created sites for the last 10 years is to try to make them useful and let the links build naturally which more or less worked until April this year. I've been tearing my hair out ever since. The only thing you can say about all of them (apart from that I own them but I've been careful with whois etc) is that the link profile is 100% natural apart from the 2 provisos above. Since April I've hired people but I'm down $20K but not any better in the rankings. A few of the sites are: short-hairstyles.com was number 1 for short hairstyles and short haircuts for years then Penguin came and its dropped off for both. It had 10000 or so spammy message board links posted by someone as negative seo I have got some removed but google webmaster tools still reports them as there. There are tentative signs of recovery (maybe) but no traffic increase. 1001-hairstyles.com has been there or there abouts for 10 years for the keyword hairstyles and hair styles until April. A site ourlipsaresealed.skyblogs.be has 30000 links to it (there are only 40000 total) with the anchor text haarstijls which is dutch for hairstyles, I don't think its malicious just they set a template and do a new page every day and they also link in the same way to a competitor who wasn't affected. An seo firm have been working on this one for a few months, the traffic increased 50% a couple of weeks ago but bombed the day after to worse than before. Prom-hairstyles.org when the same way as above in April. The only back link oddity is a site polyvore.com links to it about 400 times (out of 1000 or so total) they are using our pictures to sell their prom dresses (with out permission) but mostly deep link. Most of the other sites went in a similar way but have no obvious backlink anomalies. Do I use the link disavowel tool? I am a bit wary of it because if you watch matt cutts video he keeps reiterating that the tool is for people who have used dodgy link practises in the past and want to do a clean up but that isn't me so am I owning up to something I haven't done by using it? Are the search results as strange in everybody's niche? In mine there is some real dross as well as loads of pinterest and other user generated stuff. Sorry to go on for so long and thanks for getting this far. Ian
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jwdl0 -
"Unnatural Linking" Warning/Penalty - Anyone's company help with overcoming this?
I have a few sites where I didn't manage the quality of my vendors and now am staring at some GWT warnings for unnatural linking. I'm assuming a penalty is coming down the pipe and unfortunately these aren't my sites so looking to get on the ball with unwinding anything we can as soon as possible. Does anyone's company have experience or could pass along a reference to another company who successfully dealt with these issues? A few items coming to mind include solid and speedy processes to removing offending links, and properly dealing with the resubmission request?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b2bmarketer0