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Hi All, I would guess that a great number of us new to SEO (or not) share some simple beliefs in relation to Google indexing and Sitemaps, and as such get confused by what Web master tools shows us. It would be great if somone with experience/knowledge could clear this up for once and all 🙂 Common beliefs: Google will crawl your site from the top down, following each link and recursively repeating the process until it bottoms out/becomes cyclic. A Sitemap can be provided that outlines the definitive structure of the site, and is especially useful for links that may not be easily discovered via crawling. In Google’s webmaster tools in the sitemap section the number of pages indexed shows the number of pages in your sitemap that Google considers to be worthwhile indexing. If you place a rel="canonical" tag on every page pointing to the definitive version you will avoid duplicate content and aid Google in its indexing endeavour. These preconceptions seem fair, but must be flawed. Our site has 1,417 pages as listed in our Sitemap.  Google’s tools tell us there are no issues with this sitemap but a mere 44 are indexed!  We submit 2,716 images (because we create all our own images for products) and a disappointing zero are indexed. Under Health->Index status in WM tools, we apparently have 4,169 pages indexed.  I tend to assume these are old pages that now yield a 404 if they are visited. It could be that Google’s Indexed quotient of 44 could mean “Pages indexed by virtue of your sitemap, i.e. we didn’t find them by crawling – so thanks for that”, but despite trawling through Google’s help, I don’t really get that feeling. This is basic stuff, but I suspect a great number of us struggle to understand the disparity between our expectations and what WM Tools yields, and we go on to either ignore an important problem, or waste time on non-issues. Can anyone shine a light on this for once and all? If you are interested, our map looks like this : http://www.1010direct.com/Sitemap.xml Many thanks Paul

Hi all, Looking through the lovely SEOMOZ report, by far its biggest complaint is that of perceived duplicate content.  Its hard to avoid given the nature of eCommerce sites that oestensibly list products in a consistent framework. Most advice about duplicate content is about canonicalisation, but thats not really relevant when you have two different products being perceived as the same. Thing is, I might have ignored it but google ignores about 40% of our site map for I suspect the same reason.  Basically I dont want us to appear "Spammy".  Actually we do go to a lot of time to photograph and put a little flavour text for each product (in progress). I guess my question is, that given over 700 products, why 300ish of them would be considered duplicates and the remaning not? Here is a URL and one of its "duplicates" according to the SEOMOZ report: http://www.1010direct.com/DGV-DD1165-970-53/details.aspx
http://www.1010direct.com/TDV-019-GOLD-50/details.aspx Thanks for any help people