Low Index: 72 pages submitted and only 1 Indexed?

[edward-may]

Hi Mozers,

I'm pretty stuck on this and wondering if anybody else can give me some heads up around what might be causing the issues.

I have 3 top level domains, NZ, AU, and USA.  For some od reason I seem to be having a real issue with these pages indexing and also the sitemaps and I'm considering hiring someone to get the issue sorted as myself or my developer can''t seem to find the issues.

I have attached an example of the sitemap_au.xml file.  As you can see there is only 1 page that has been indexed and 72 were submitted.  Basically because we host all of our domains on the same server, I was told last time our sitemaps were possibly been overwritten hence the reason why we have sitemap_au.xml and its the same for the other sitemap_nz.xml and sitemap_us.xml I also orignially had sitemap.xml for each.

Another issue I am having is the meta tag des for each home page in USA and AU are showing the meta tag for New Zealand but when you look into the com and com.au code meta tag description they are all different as you can see here http://bit.ly/1KTbWg0 and here http://bit.ly/1AU0f5k

Any advice around this would be so much appreciated!

Thanks

Justin

new

[DSM_UK]

Hi,

Yes you've got it spot on, 301s are there to keep old things pointing to the new, but only the new should be in the sitemap.

When you've crawled the live site ready to make your sitemap you can manually right click and remove a URL you would not want in there before generating it.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

[edward-may]

Hey Jimmy,

Wow thanks so much for your great feedback, much appreciated!

Just want to clarify your answer to the 301.  So it is okay to create the 301s for our users to direct them to the new urls, but not good to include in the sitemap?  Am I correct in saying this? Or am I totally off track with this?

I think whats happened also is the sitemap from screaming frog has generated old urls and some new urls as well, I'm now seeing a two of our contact pages indexed for the com.au site, one is the older url and the other is the new url.

Let me know your feedback

Cheers again Jimmy

[DSM_UK]

Hi Justin,

Yes as long as WMT is specifically watching the HTTPS website then the problem is not in WMT unfortunately.

As hectormainar says, check your sitemap in screaming frog
 go to your sitemap.xml and save it to your computer
 change the frog to list mode
 open your sitemap and run

All the links in the sitemap should report 200
any 301s should be swapped with the direct versions

The 301 is good to maintain backwards compatibility and allow backlinks and old users to navigate to your new content, but shouldn't be used as major navigation.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

[edward-may]

Hey Jimmy,

Thanks for the heads up! Yes, I have been watching this via WMT and also I used screaming frog to generate the sitemaps and gave to my developer he then gave me the url to submit to google.

I also used https.  I hope that helps?

Let me know if you have any further questions

Cheers Jimmy thanks again

[edward-may]

Hi Hectormainar,

I understand what your saying, yes we had https://www.zenory.com.au/psychic-readings/psychic-readings before we updated the urls to the following https://www.zenory.com.au/psychic-readings

after doing this we were told to add 301 redirects.. so am a little confused now as to why it should not be done as our visitors would go to the old urls?

I used screaming frog to generate the sitemaps, and from that I think it included the urls? I'm not too sure which exactly it included?  Is there a way to check this?

Thanks for your help

Justin

[hectormainar]

Which URLs do you include in your sitemap? Could you check if you try to index
https://www.zenory.com.au/psychic-readings/psychic-readings or https://www.zenory.com.au/psychic-readings ?

The first one is the URL you link at menus, but it has a 301 redirect to the second URL format (and the same for the rest of main options). That is quite a bad idea. Please make sure you include the correct address on the sitemap and not the 301 redirect one. That could be causing the problem of Google Webmaster Tools not showing that page in your sitemap as indexed, as although final page is properly indexed in google (as you can check if you look up for site:www.zenory.com.au), GWT is not able to match both addresses.

[DSM_UK]

Hi Justin,

It is hard to tell by your screenshot, but what website are you watching in Webamasters Tools? As you are using https, the website to track would have to be the https one as a recent WMT update now classifies these differently.

Having crawled your sites with the screaming frog, I don't see any smoking guns as to why the pages would not be indexed.

Let me know about the WMT account

Kind Regards

Jimmy

[edward-may]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your response! I have also done site:yourdomain and this is also showing up quiet low compared to the amount of pages submitted.  usa is showing 10 pages indexed.  AU slightly more and NZ alot more.

[MickEdwards]

Webmaster Tools is not a current accurate reflection of what is actually indexed.

A search in Google for site:yourdomain.com will show the accurate information.