Sitemap in Google Webmaster

[Rain-shine]

Can someone advise me please?

I use the Yoast seo plugin to generate my sitemap and submitted it to google many month ago.

When i check in my google webmaster account however there are times when it is as if it has vanished - it tells me 0 urls have been submitted.

I havent removed it or changed it or regenerated it in my wordpress site so i cant understand why it continually does this.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards

Laura

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Turn it off, don't submit a sitemap if you are using wordpress you don't need one.
make sure google can get at your images also. but sitemap not needed.

 

[William Crum]

Try to sumbit again hope this will work for you.

 

[webgeek]

Always submit the sitemap(s). You may have one sitemap.xml (or similar), or many included within one sitemap-index.xml (or other name).

It should be referenced in your robots.txt so that spiders can easily find the content that you intend for them to consume. It reduced crawl load, speeds finding/indexing of the key content you intend, etc.

Most of all though, it gives you the ability to see what's indexed and what's not. On larger sites, breaking down the content by category or other logical means will then enable you to see that the /menswear/* has 627 out of 959 submitted URL's, keying you in to where you're having issues with content (quality, depth, duplication, and so on).

By comparing indexed URL's with sitemap URL's and then comparing them against your own crawler/crawled URL's you can identify indexation issues, parameters needing blocked (like /checkout/login) or at least canonicalised (like ?page= sub pages on a category, where they are canonical pointing to the main category or view-all page).

It's critical to quality efforts that you know what's creeped into the index but shouldn't have, what's not in the index but should be and what's errantly missing or extraneously included in your sitemaps in error.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

I agree, with the above. it is auto generated sitemaps that are not ideal.

 

[samtaylorseo]

The Yoast XML sitemap page is split into elements ( one for posts another for pages etc.), make sure you submit these individual sitemaps and not the Yoast sitemap listing page. It's a shame that it's different to most other sitemaps.

 

[Rain-shine]

Thanks everyone. I resubmitted it but still getting the same problem.

Samtaylorse you mention submitting individually so via yoast plugin so I'll try to do that now too.

Thanks everyone for your helpful comment.

Best wishes Laura

 

[fisicx]

Are all your posts, pages and products already indexed and ranked? If so then you don't need a sitemap. If not, then your navigation needs work.

Do not ever, ever, ever use an auto generated sitemap. Especially not the one bundled with yoast. It will hurt your ranking.

 

[Rain-shine]

Oh I'm really confused now.

So I SHOULDN'T submit my sitemap via google webmasters for my wordpress site?

 

[fisicx]

Like I said, if all your pages are already indexed a sitemap isn't needed. If you had a huge site with thousands of changing products then it may have some value. But you don't. Just make sure every product can be accessed via links and ignore the sitemap.

 

[fisicx]

To clarify a bit.

Google uses your internal linking, page relationships and a whole load of other signals to determine the importance of each page on your site.

Auto generated sitemaps set the importance of every page to 0.5 on a scale of 0 to 1. This means all your careful onsite SEO work can get blown away. I've tested this. I created a sitemap using a plugin and ranking dropped. I removed the sitemap and ranking returned.

 

[Rain-shine]

To clarify a bit.

Google uses your internal linking, page relationships and a whole load of other signals to determine the importance of each page on your site.

Auto generated sitemaps set the importance of every page to 0.5 on a scale of 0 to 1. This means all your careful onsite SEO work can get blown away. I've tested this. I created a sitemap using a plugin and ranking dropped. I removed the sitemap and ranking returned.

That's pretty worrying. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[pcproblems]

I've been generating ones with xml-sitemaps.com for static sites and wordpress, are these a bad idea as well please?

 

[fisicx]

Same question, are the sites already indexed? If so then the sitemap has no value.

In any case, when the sitemaps are generated are you setting page importance? If not you could be hurting your ranking.

 

[pcproblems]

I think that I've always used the default priority which is 0.5 so I will see if it can be changed although I'm going to do some more work on navigation... Thank You

 

[fisicx]

The actual importance score isn't the thing. It's making sure you score each and every page according to its importance.

Or better still, bin the sitemap and optimise the site so it's clear to google what pages are important.

 

[pcproblems]

Got it, many thanks fisicx... Not sure that I will fiddle with my PC repair site as it's generally top for computer repairs in salisbury

 

[fisicx]

Mr. Blazik, you are an idiot. Try reading the whole thread.