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Our xml sitemap is divided up in to many smaller xml sitemaps so we have fewer products per sitemap, in order to easily identify errors.

A couple of weeks ago, we changed our xml sitemap by reordering some of the products. However, this has left some old xml sitemaps without any data, and they are no longer appearing in our xml sitemap. But, Google is still identifying these sitemaps since they once existed, and they are giving errors since they can't locate them. Should we 404 those xml sitemaps, or is there a better way to handle this?

At the end of April we changed the url structure of most of our pages and 301 redirected the old pages to the new ones. The xml sitemaps were also updated at that point to reflect the new url structure. Since then Google has not indexed the new urls from our xml sitemaps and I am unsure of why. We are at 4 weeks since the change, so I would have thought they would have indexed the pages by now. Any ideas on what I should check to make sure pages are indexed?

Finally we were able to get a 200 response. Thank you for your input.

We have recently made updates to our xml sitemap and have split them into child sitemaps. Once these were submitted to search console, we received notification that the all of the child sitemaps except 1 produced 404 errors. However, when we view the xml sitemaps in a browser, there are no errors. I have also attempted crawling the child sitemaps with Screaming Frog and received 404 responses there as well. My developer cannot figure out what is causing the errors and I'm hoping someone here can assist. Here is one of the child sitemaps: http://www.sermonspice.com/sitemap-countdowns_paged_1.xml

We have a site, domainA.com and we split part of the site off into it's own site a couple of years ago as domainB.com. All urls from DomainA were 301 redirected to DomainB, but with a different folder structure. For business reasons, we now shuttering domainB and rolling it back into domainA. For the 301 redirects for urls that were on the original domainA, should I overwrite them to the new folder structure directly from the original urls? In other words:

301 redirect domainA.com/oldstructure to domainA.com/newstructure

rather than:

Existing 301 redirect domainA.com/oldstructure to domainB.com/newstructuretopic with a new 301 redirect to domainA.com/newstructuretopictopic

I have several sites that I do SEO for that are having a common problem. I have submitted xml sitemaps to Google for each site, and as new pages are added to the site, they are added to the xml sitemap. To make sure new pages are being indexed, I check the number of pages that have been indexed vs. the number of pages submitted by the xml sitemap every week. For weeks now, the number of pages submitted has increased, but the number of pages actually indexed has not changed. I have done searches on Google for the new pages and they are always added to the index, but the number of indexed pages is still not changing. My initial thought was as new pages are added to the index, old ones are being dropped. But I can't find evidence of that, or understand why that would be the case. Any ideas on why this is happening? Or am I worrying about something that I shouldn't even be concerned with since new pages are being indexed?

I'm working on a ecommerce site that allows product search results pages to be sorted a variety of ways (best selling, newest, by price). Each of these search filters creates a new url i.e. /all/best/1 and /all/best/2; /all/new/1 and /all/new/2; etc. These search results pages have been indexed and the site is receiving enough organic traffic from these pages that I don't want to add noindex,follow to them. I am planning on implementing rel=prev,rel=next for each filter, but I'm concerned about duplicate content considering I can't create unique meta data for each page. Should I canonical all pages to the first search results page without filters applied? Or any other ideas on how I should proceed?

I have a site that provides a service where listings are displayed on site for 30 days, then they expire. These listings are categorized by type. On occasion, categories have no listings available, and Google Webmaster Tools is listing them as Soft 404 errors. It's not possible to remove these categories and 301 redirect to another page. Any suggestions on how to work around the soft 404s?

I have several sites that I do SEO for that are having a common problem. I have submitted xml sitemaps to Google for each site, and as new pages are added to the site, they are added to the xml sitemap. To make sure new pages are being indexed, I check the number of pages that have been indexed vs. the number of pages submitted by the xml sitemap every week. For weeks now, the number of pages submitted has increased, but the number of pages actually indexed has not changed. I have done searches on Google for the new pages and they are always added to the index, but the number of indexed pages is still not changing. My initial thought was as new pages are added to the index, old ones are being dropped. But I can't find evidence of that, or understand why that would be the case. Any ideas on why this is happening? Or am I worrying about something that I shouldn't even be concerned with since new pages are being indexed?