Sitemap - % of URL's in Google Index?

[stats44]

What is the average % of links from a sitemap that are included in the Google index? Obviously want to aim for 100% of the sitemap urls to be indexed, is this realistic?

[STPseo]

Hi. We have a stiemap with over 250,000 URLs and we are at 87%. This is a high for us. We have never been able to get 100%. We have been trying to clean up the sitemap a bit but with so many URLs it is hard to go through it line by line. We are making more of an effort to fix the errors Google tells us about in Webmaster Tools but these only account for a fraction of the URLs apparently not indexed.

We also do site searches on Google to see how many URLs total we have in Google as our sitemap only includes "the most important" pages. Doing a search for "site:www.sierratradingpost.com" comes up with over 400,000 URLs.

For us, I don't think 100% is realistic. We have never been able to achieve it. It will be interesting to see what other SEOmozers have to report!

[RyanKent]

The percent of pages indexed varies greatly with each site. If you desire 100% of your site indexed then 100% of your site's pages should be reviewed to ensure their content is worthy of being indexed. The content should be unique, well written and properly presented. Your sitemap process also needs to be carefully reviewed. Many site owners simply set up an automated process without taking the time to ensure it is properly configured. Often pages which are blocked by robots.txt are included in the site map, and those pages will not be indexed.

Many people say "I want 100% of my site indexed" just how many people say "I want to be #1 rank in Google". Both results are achievable, but both require time and effort, and perhaps money.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Ryan's point is important to note.  100% is achievable under the correct circumstances.  I've got a client with 34 million pages on their main site (and contained within a combined 909 sitemap xml files), and they have 34 million pages indexed.

[STPseo]

Wow. Do you have a third party program to build your site map files or our you using something built in house?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Clients, so I have no idea how they do it.  It's a complex automated process for sure.

[irvingw]

If all the pages in your sitemap are worthy of the Google index, then you should expect around a 100% indexation rate. On the flip side, if you reference low quality pages in your sitemap file, you will not got them indexed and may even be hurting the trust of your sitemap file. As a point in case, Bing just recently announced that if they see an error rate greater than 1% in the sitemap, then they will just ignore your sitemap file.