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    4. What may be the reason a sitemap is not indexed in Webmaster Tools?

    What may be the reason a sitemap is not indexed in Webmaster Tools?

    Technical SEO Issues
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    • SorinaDascalu
      SorinaDascalu last edited by

      Hi,
      I have a problem with a client's website. I searched many related questions here about the same problem but couldn't figure out a solution.

      Their website is in 2 languages and they submitted 2 sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. One got 100% indexed. From the second one, from over 800 URLs only 32 are indexed.

      I checked the following hypothesis why the second sitemap may not get indexed:

      • sitemap is wrongly formatted - False
      • sitemap contains URLs that don't return 200 status - False, there are no URLs that return 404, 301 or 302 status codes
      • sitemap contains URLs that are blocked by robots.txt - False
      • internal duplicate content problems - False
      • issues with meta canonical tags - False

      For clarification, URLs from the sitemap that is not indexed completely also don't show up in Google index.

      Can someone tell me what can I also check to fix this issue?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Asher
        Asher last edited by

        Hey Sorina,

        I had a similar problem a while back and just rebuilt my sitemap, that seemed to take care of the problem for me.  However, if that doesn't work for you, Google offers support via its "help articles".  Here is something to look at: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35738.

        I hope that helps.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • SorinaDascalu
          SorinaDascalu last edited by

          Hi Jason and thank you for your answer. 
          The sitemap was just rebuilt a week ago, with the same idea in mind, maybe this will fix the problem. But it didn't...

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Martijn_Scheijbeler
            Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

            Sorina, can you add your sitemap in here so we can take a look what possibly could go wrong? It's not uncommon that the urls within a sitemap don't get indexed. I mostly saw that with image sitemaps that over 70% isn't getting indexed.

            SorinaDascalu 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • SorinaDascalu
              SorinaDascalu @Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

              Hi Martijn, 
              This sitemap doesn't contain images at all

              I can't put the URL here in plain text, please see attached image.

              sitemap-issue-moz.png

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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