I need an XML sitemap expert for 5 minutes!

[IcanAgency]

Hi all!

I'm hoping that someone with a lot of experience with XML sitemaps can help me out here...

When submitting my sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, these are the results:
2,414,714 Submitted
34,721 Indexed

And there's also tonnes of warnings.

Would anyone be able to take a quick look at these sitemaps to perhaps advise me on what's going wrong there? These do not load without the www, not sure if this is an issue?

http://www.eumom.ie/sitemap.xml
http://www.eumom.ie/sitemap.xml.gz

Thanks everyone in advance!!

Gavin

[evolvingSEO]

Few rules about sitemaps;

• You should only include in them pages you also want crawled and indexed

• They should not contain URLs with 404s or blocked by robots.txt

My guess is there are too many URLs in the sitemaps, since I'd guess the website is not over 2 million actual "real" pages,

Also, I randomly clicked on a URL in one of the sitemaps and it 404'd;

http://www.eumom.ie/forums/topic/oakhill-school-leopardstown-/

This is probably causing a lot of the errors you see. It's honestly not a 5 minute fix - but if it were my site, I would be using the Yoast SEO plugin and using the sitemap feature within Yoast. It makes it very easy to include / exclude certain pages and updated automatically etc.

I think there must be a way to tell your plugin what to include / exclude from the sitemap but I don't have as much experience with it.

But generally - only include pages you want crawled and indexed. Don't include pages that 404.

[IcanAgency]

Hi all,

Many thanks for your input so far, much appreciated!

The sitemaps that you are seeing actually were generated using that plugin you mentioned. Formatting-wise, do you see anything wrong with the sitemaps?

Thanks!!
Gavin

[Bryan_Loconto]

I couldn't agree more altecdesign!

http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ all the way!

[altecdesign]

That XML sitemap you linked too is formatted in an odd way. I noticed the site you are generating the xml sitemap for is based in wordpress.  There is a really solid sitemap plugin you could use to generate your XML and submit to google instead of the current plugin you are using: http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

I've used that plugnin numerous times and submitted sitemaps to google with no errors. Hopefully that helps you out.