100 Web Pages Submitted, only 4 Crawled since March 2012?

[TommyTan]

Hi Smart SEOmozers!

I actually have three questions and they all kind of related.  Thanks in advance!

1. Since March 2012 and up to today, January 2013, I checked Webmasters and it showed that 100 webpages have been submitted and only 4 crawled.  Why is that?  I don't have 50000 pages like other websites and it had been 10 Months but still only 4 web pages crawled?  I didn't block any URLs or have any no crawl meta tags.  hmmmmm Why this happened?

2. Another related question, I then checked Health >>> Index Status, it showed 198 indexed.  SO if it had 198 pages indexed why in the sitemap report it only showed 4 web pages crawled out of 100?  What happened to that 96?

3. While I'm on the Index Status, it showed that I have some webpages as Not Selected and that is due to 301 redirects.  I've recently did 301 redirects to majority of the pages.  I am wondering will this affect our ranking?  Any idea how long it will take them to drop the old links and reindex the new links?

Thank you all!

[BizDetox]

My best guess without seeing the files is Broken Links, Either through the sitemap you created or actually on your site. Use the Marketing Ninjas broken link check tools. They really have a good one. It will show all your pages and the status code on each page.

Second, i would redo the sitemap. What are you using to do your XML site map and how are you submitting it, through Google Webmastertools, and through Bing webmaster Central ?

Google Webmaster tools also has some really cool self test tools, that it will show if any error did occur during the crawl and you can always do a test crawl with their robot.

Third check your Robot.txt file and make sure its correct. You would be surprised !

[TommyTan]

Hi, Thanks for the answer.

I believe the sitemap was submitted via Google Webmaster Tools by the previous webmaster.  Redoing it might be a possible solution.  However, I checked the links submitted and I do noticed a few broken but majority of them are still valid/works so I still don't understand why only 4 were crawled.  As you've mentioned, i tested the sitemap.xml but there weren't any errors found by Google.

Do you have any idea on the other 2 questions?  Thank you!

[BizDetox]

Redo the Sitemap and resubmit.

Depends on what you are using for CMS there are some really good modules or plugins that help you do a good site map.

I use Joomla XML site map.

Works great and google initially only crawls portions of all your pages on your server side not all but 4% is fairly low it usually is like 50% ?

REDO everything you should have any problems