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
-
New Customer spammy markup warning
I just won a new customer, yippie. Bad news after i got the full story it seems they have a google penalty against them. It could be an old malicious employee with back links. The error in GSC is spammy markup, would anyone else care to take a quick look and see what the main issues are, im not sure of the tags or all the additional info and alternate names, they are relevant but maybe too much in rich snippets. the site is aipctshop.com. Thank you in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bendh0 -
Robots.txt file in Shopify - Collection and Product Page Crawling Issue
Hi, I am working on one big eCommerce store which have more then 1000 Product. we just moved platform WP to Shopify getting noindex issue. when i check robots.txt i found below code which is very confusing for me. **I am not getting meaning of below tags.** Disallow: /collections/+ Disallow: /collections/%2B Disallow: /collections/%2b Disallow: /blogs/+ Disallow: /blogs/%2B Disallow: /blogs/%2b I can understand that my robots.txt disallows SEs to crawling and indexing my all product pages. ( collection/*+* ) Is this the query which is affecting the indexing product pages? Please explain me how this robots.txt work in shopify and once my page crawl and index by google.com then what is use of Disallow: Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
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 -
Site redesign what to consider to avoid any issues
Hi GUYS I want to avoid getting myself into a bad situation with google, so I'm just wanting to know if there are any steps I would need to take whilst I'm redesigning and developing my site as I'm currently deploying our new designs. One thing I noticed, i have my new designs and content on our development server to run through any checks before deploying it to the live environment, however while our live site is up, I have duplicate content on the live site that exactly matches the dev site for obvious reasons but do I need to tell google that the dev site is for development purposes only so google knows I'm not duplicating content? I have searched around to find some more info about this, if anyone has some insight i would be glad to know your thoughts. Thank you in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Potential spam issue - back links
Hi - we have a client whom we work with for SEO. During a review we noticed in Webmaster Tools, there was an IP address with over 30,000 links to our clients site. The IP address is 92.60.0.123. From looking up the IP address details, it looks like it is based in Europe - but we are unable to establish what it is, where the links are and who created it. We are concerned it could be a potential spammer trying to cause an issue with the SEO campaign. Is there any way of finding out any more details apart from the basic information about the location of the IP address? Also - if we submit a disavow via webmaster tools, we are unsure what issue it will have on the clients site if we do not know what it is and the type of links it is creating. Any ideas? Thanks for your help! Phil.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Globalgraphics0 -
Does IP Blacklist cause SEO issues?
Hi, Our IP was recently blacklisted - we had a malicious script sending out bulk mail in a Joomla installation. Does it hurt our SEO if we have a domain hosted on that IP? Any solid evidence? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
A client/Spam penalty issue
Wondering if I could pick the brains of those with more wisdom than me... Firstly, sorry but unable to give the client's url on this topic. I know that will not help with people giving answers but the client would prefer it if this thread etc didn't appear when people type their name in google. Right, to cut a long story short..gained a new client a few months back, did the usual things when starting the project of reviewing the backlinks using OSE and Majestic. There were a few iffy links but got most of those removed. In the last couple of months have been building backlinks via guest blogging and using bloggerlinkup and myblogguest (and some industry specific directories found using linkprospector tool). All way going well, the client were getting about 2.5k hits a day, on about 13k impressions. Then came the last Google update. The client were hit, but not massively. Seemed to drop from top 3 for a lot of keywords to average position of 5-8, so still first page. The traffic went down after this. All the sites which replaced the client were the big name brands in the niche (home improvement, sites such as BandQ, Homebase, for the fellow UK'ers). This was annoying but understandable. However, on 27th June. We got the following message in WMT - Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GrumpyCarl
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to xxxx.co.uk/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site. This was a shock to say the least. A few days later the traffic on the site went down more and the impressions dropped to about 10k a day (oddly the rankings seem to be where they were after the Google update so perhaps a delayed message). To get back up to date....after digging around more it appears there are a lot of SENUKE type links to the site - links on poor wiki sites,a lot of blog commenting links, mostly from irrelevant sites, i enclose a couple of examples below. I have broken the links so they don't get any link benefit from this site. They are all safe for work http:// jonnyhetherington. com/2012/02/i-need-a-new-bbq/?replytocom=984 http:// www.acgworld. cn/archives/529/comment-page-3 In addition to this there is a lot of forum spam, links from porn sites and links from sites with Malware warnings. To be honest, it is almost perfect negative seo!! I contacted several of the sites in question (about 450) and requested they remove the links, the vast majority of the sites have no contact on them so I cannot get the links removed. I did a disavow on these links and then a reconsideration request but was told that this is unsuccessful as the site still was being naughty. Given that I can neither remove the links myself or get Google to ignore them, my options for lifting this penalty are limited. What would be the course of action others would take, please. Thanks and sorry for overally long post0 -
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