Forum Moderators: goodroi
I have submitted a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools which consist of 13 urls, but only 12 are indexed. So I kind of have a two part question here.
GWT used to have a link, "What Google sees" or something like that, but it is gone now. How am I able to tell what urls it is indexing and which ones it isn't?
Also what would be some of the usual causes for GWT to not index 1 or 2 urls?
I have quite a few sites and half of them, all the submitted urls are indexed and half of them are not indexing 1 to a few urls.
Anyone?
Please remember that sitemaps are simply another way to help search engines better discover your website. Sitemaps DO NOT guarantee the search engines will index your content. To increase the probability that the search engines will index your urls you should make sure each url has significant unique and useful content plus a significant amount of internal and external link popularity.
If your pages are deemed to be too similar to each other or too similar to pages already published on another website the search engines will likely not index them. If your pages have little or no link popularity the search engines will take that as a sign the pages are not very important. If the pages were valuable then more people would be linking to them.
It may be more beneficial to you if focus your efforts on making sure your content is unique and useful. The higher quality the content is the higher the chances it has to attract links and people will be more likely to link to you when you ask for links.
I definitely have the "unique" factor down, and there are plenty of quality external links to these sites (vacation related, so plenty of travel sites link to them). They also usually rank if not 1st, very high in SERPs.
I had this question because I was putting together a robots.txt and It made me question the fact of if I even wanted these un-indexed pages to be indexed at all? Do I want to remove them? Then I thought Well I don't even know what the pages are. But now I do. Thanks!
The page not being indexed is the example.com/index.htm. So within my sitemap I have the index.htm listed as well as the example.com/.
Should I even have this listed in my sitemap at all, considering they are both the same? I guess what I am trying to ask is if it pointless to list both?
