How do I get my pages to go from "Submitted" to "Indexed" in Google Webmaster Tools?

[Nate_D]

Background: I recently launched a new site and it's performing much better than the old site in terms of bounce rate, page view, pages per session, session duration, and conversions.

As suspected, sessions, users, and % new sessions are all down. Which I'm okay with because the the old site had a lot of low quality traffic going to it. The traffic we have now is much more engaged and targeted.

Lastly, the site was built using Squarespace and was launched the middle of August.

**Question: **When reviewing Google Webmaster Tools' Sitemaps section, I noticed it says 57 web pages Submitted, but only 5 Indexed! The sitemap that's submitted seems to be all there. I'm not sure if this is a Squarespace thing or what. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!!

[trung.ngo]

Hi Nate,

Glad to hear that the new site is a success! A few things I would check:

• An obvious one: check to see if there are any errors/warnings reported in webmaster tools for your sitemap.
• Review the URLs included in your XML sitemap to ensure that only URLs responding 200 are included (exception is if you're migrating URLs and want to included URLs responding 301 so that they're picked up by search engines faster, theoretically anyway. But you'd want to update the sitemap once the 301s are removed from the index.)
• Check the 'Index Status' report in Webmaster Tools to make sure there isn't a unanticipated decline in indexed pages.
• Do a 'site:yoursite.com' query to get a broad sense of what pages are actually included in the search results. I've found the Webmaster Tools Submitted/Indexed number to vary in terms of accuracy--not super reliable in my experience. The goal with this check up is to ensure that your site's main pages are indexed. You can include subfolders if you want to get more granular, e.g. 'site:yoursite.com/subfolder'.
• Monitor the page's sending visits from organic search in Google Analytics. This will also give you a better sense of what's indexed.

Hope this helps you get started!

-Trung

[Nate_D]

Thanks for the reply, Trung! Here's what I found...

• No errors or warnings in WMT.
• To be honest, I'm not sure how to do this one
• The 'Index Status' report in WMT says there's a total of 86 indexed pages as of 10/5/14!! Which is great, but even more confusing when I consider my original question.
• The "site:" search confirms what's stated above - "About 87 results", it says.

So, it looks like we're in the clear. I'm just not sure what the Crawl>Sitemaps>Web pages, 57 Submitted vs 5 Indexed means. Strange, huh? (I attached a pic so you can see what I'm referencing.)

Thanks again!

00000267.png

[Atlanta-SMO]

How long has the site been in the "submitted" status?

[Nate_D]

Hmmm. Looks like since before 9/10. Check out the attachment...

00000268.png

[DennisSeymour]

You mentioned SS is your platform. Then it's probably an image/CDN problem.

The image will be given a page, since it will return a 302, it wont get indexed even if it's on the sitemap.

If you have a lot of images on your site, then a good chunk of page wont show as indexed in webmaster tools

Something like that

[Nate_D]

Great answer! I noticed SS assign images to their own pages.

Is there a "best practice" for addressing this? Should I try to exclude the pages from being indexed?