When I try creating a sitemap, it doesnt crawl my entire site.
-
We just launched a new Ruby app at (used to be a wordpress blog) -
We have not had time to create an auto-generated sitemap, so I went to a few different websites with free sitemap generation tools. Most of them index up to 100 or 500 URLS. Our site has over 1,000 individual listings and 3 landing pages, so when I put our URL into a sitemap creator, it should be finding all of these pages. However, that is not happening, only 4 pages seem to be seen by the crawlers.
TheSquareFoothttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/http://www.thesquarefoot.com/users/sign_inhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/searchhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/renters/sign_upThis worries me that when Google comes to crawl our site, these are the only pages it will see as well. Our robots.txt is blank, so there should be nothing stopping the crawlers from going through the entire site. Here is an example of one of the 1,000s of pages not being crawled****http://www.thesquarefoot.com/listings/Houston/TX/77098/Central_Houston/3910_Kirby_Dr/Suite_204Any help would be much appreciated!
-
Thanks for you help, can I ask one more question -
We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app -
http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml
Which has over 1,300 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,025 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages.
Any help would be appreciated!
Aron
-
I'd worry less about the sitemaps and more about internal linking structure. The problem you are having with crawlers is as symptom of the linking problem.
Most of your content seems to be on the other side of a search form. When crawlers, including those from search engines, explore you site they are looking for href links to follow - they will not submit forms.
If then you want the other content to be indexed then you need to provide a crawl path to it. Could you add links to each neighbourhood on page somewhere so that there is path to follow? That might lead on to further questions about your url structure and use of ajax too.
The general principal is that you should link to content you want to rank. Many will argue that a sitemap removes that necessity, but links provide more information that a list of URLs and I certainly wouldn't rely on sitemaps alone to get content indexed let alone ranked.
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
-
What should my main sitemap URL be?
Hi Mozzers - regarding the URL of a website's main website: http://example.com/sitemap.xml is the normal way of doing it but would it matter if I varied this to: http://example.com/mainsitemapxml.xml or similar? I can't imagine it would matter but I have never moved away from the former before - and one of my clients doesn't want to format the URL in that way. What the client is doing is actually quite interesting - they have the main sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml - that redirects to the sitemap file which is http://example.com/sitemap (with no xml extension) - might that redirect and missing xml extension the redirected to sitemap cause an issue? Never come across such a setup before. Thanks in advance for your feedback - Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
My site shows 503 error to Google bot, but can see the site fine. Not indexing in Google. Help
Hi, This site is not indexed on Google at all. http://www.thethreehorseshoespub.co.uk Looking into it, it seems to be giving a 503 error to the google bot. I can see the site I have checked source code Checked robots Did have a sitemap param. but removed it for testing GWMT is showing 'unreachable' if I submit a site map or fetch Any ideas on how to remove this error? Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Crawl rate drop
Hi Guys, I have a crawl rate drop in webmastertools and can't figure out way. In the last month I removed a lot o duplicate pages that we don't need anymore, there were at least 1.5 million pages. Can this be a motive? D7O5x1l
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silviu0 -
Merging Niche Site
I posted a question about this a while ago, but still haven't pulled the trigger. I have a main site (bobsclothing.com). I also have a EM niche site (i.e shirtsmall.com). It would be more efficient for me to merge these site, because: I would have to manage content, promos, etc. on a single site. In other words, I can focus efforts on 1 site. If I am writing content, I don't have to split the work. I don't have to worry about duplicate content. Right now, if I enter a product URL into copyscape, the other sites is returned for many products. What makes me apprehensive are: The niche site actually ranks for more keywords than the main site, although it has lower revenue. Slightly lower PA, and DA. Niche site ranks top 20 for a profitable keyword that has about 1300 exact match searches. If you include the longer tail versions of the keyword it would be more. If I merge these sites, and do proper 301s (product to product, category to category) how likely is it that main site will still rank for that keyword? Am I likely to end up with a site that has stronger DA? Am I better off keeping the niche site and just focusing content efforts on the few keywords that it can rank well for? I appreciate any advice. If someone has done this, please share your experience. TIA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Site dropped after recovery
Hi everybody! I've been working for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com for some time now. They came to me as they had dropped heavily for their main term, "boot camp". This turned out to be due to a manual penalty, which was in part due to their forum being hacked, as well as some bad link building. Here's an example of the dodgy forum links - http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html. The anchor is "microsoft". They've all been 410'd now. Also, we cleaned up the other bad links as best we could, and got through the manual penalty. The site then returned to #5 for "boot camps", below its pre-crash peak of #2, but OK. Over the past few weeks, it has started to slide though. I'm certain it is not down to a lack of quality links - this site has great PR and links from national newspapers and magazines. There's been a few on-site issues too, but nothing outrageous. I'm getting a bit stumped though, and any fresh eyes would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
What do I do about sites that copy my content?
I've noticed that there are a number of websites that are copying my content. They are putting the full article on their site, mentioning that it was reposted from my site, but contains no links to me. How should I approach this? What are my rights and should I ask them to remove it or add a link? Will the duplicate content affect me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Building a mobile site.
We are building a mobile site that will be launching in another month. I’m concerned that the mobile site will start catabolizing our traditional rankings. Is there a way to keep this from happening? Should we utilize the cross domain canonical tag and point back to the traditional site URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Team0