Sitemap issues 19 warnings

[edward-may]

Hi Guys

I seem to be having a lot of sitemap issues.

1. I have 3 top level domains, all with the co.nz sitemap that was submitted

2. I'm in the midst of a site re-design so I'm unsure if I should be updating these now or when the new site goes live (in two weeks)

3. I have 19 warnings from GWT for the co.nz site and they gave me 3 examples looks like 404 errors however I'm not too sure and a bit green on my behalf to find out where the issues are and how to fix them.  (it is also showing that 95 pages submitted and only 53 were indexed)

4. I generated recently 2 sitemaps for .com and com.au submitted these both to google and when i create i still see the co.nz sitemap

Would love some guidance around this.

Thanks

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

Are the url's going to change when you update the design? If they are not changing you can already update now.

It's not really abnormal to have only a certain % of the sitemap indexed - it could be that Google judges that a certain number of pages is too light in content to be indexed. 55% of url's indexed seems rather low.

Sitemap errors - check the url's that are listed as errors. If I am not mistaken, you use an external tool to generate the sitemaps. It could be that this tools puts all the internal links in the the sitemap; regardless of their status (200, 301, 404) - normally only url's with status 200 should be put in the sitemap. Check the configuration of the tool you use & see if you can only add url's with status 200. Alternatively, you can check the internal linking on your site & make sure that no links exist to 404 pages (Screaming Frog is the tool to use - it can also generate the sitemap).

For the wrong sitemap- as your sites are exact duplicates, probably hosted on the same server, it could be that the .co.nz sitemap overwrites the .com sitemap , as they have the same name. You could rename your sitemap like sitemap_au.xml, sitemap_us.xml & sitemap_nz.xml. This way, if you add a new sitemap for .nz it will not overwrite the .com version. You submit these to Google & you delete the old ones (both on the server & in Google WMT).

Hope this helps.

Dirk

PS. If your design is also changing the url's - don't forget to put redirects in place that lead the old to the new url's.

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi Justin,

Could you post a screenshot of the error message and any links pointing to this URL? This way we can identify what pages return a 404. If this are important pages on your website I would fix it right now, if it however are pages you don’t use or your visitors rarely see I would make sure you pick this up with the redesign. No point in fixing this now if things will change in the near future. Besides that, sitemaps help you get your website indexed, releasing this two weeks earlier won’t make a big difference for the number of indexed pages since you won’t change your internal link structure and website authority (both help you get more pages indexed).

About your last point, could you provide me with a screenshot of this as well? When I check zenory.com/sitemap.xml I find the .com sitemap, so that part seems fine.

_PS. I would suggest you change your update frequency in your sitemap. It now states monthly, it’s probably a good idea to set this much faster since there is a blog on your website as well. At the moment you are giving Google hints to only crawl your website a few times a month. Keep in mind that you can give different parts of your website a different change frequency. For example, I give pages with user generated content a much higher change frequency then pages we need to update manually. _

[edward-may]

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[edward-may]

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[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the screenshots. Dirk's suggestion about screaming frog should be really helpful. This should give you an insight in the true 404 errors that a bot can encounter while crawling through your internal site structure.

Based on what I see I think your main problem is the manual updated sitemap. Whenever you change a page, add a new one or mix up some categories those changes won't apply to your sitemap. This creates a 404 error while those pages aren't linked to from your website and (without a sitemap) wouldn't give any 404 error messages in Google Webmaster Tools.

I saw you were using SEO by Yoast already, I suggest using their sitemap functionality. That should resolve the problem and save you work in the future since there is no need to manually update your sitemap again.

Let me know if this works!

[DirkC]

Yep - you'll have to upload the file to the server first.

Bob's suggestion to generate the sitemap via the Yoast plugin is an excellent idea.

rgds

Dirk

[edward-may]

Hi Bob

Thanks alot for your response!

That makes a lot of sense.  We use Wordpress only for the blog, but the main site is custom built and doesn't have an yoast plugin.

So I'm not sure how that will work, when I create the site map with screaming frog do I need to include the blog pages in screaming frog if I'm using the yoast plugin?

Thanks again for your help!

[edward-may]

Thanks a lot Dirk, your help has been tremendous to my SEO efforts!!!

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi Justin,

In that case I would ask your developer to make the sitemap on the website update automatically (or generate a new one every day). And submit that link to webmaster tools. If he's a real genius he could add your blog pages from Wordpress to this sitemap aswell but I'm not sure if Wordpress has a hook for this.

Alternative options:

1. Let him make the automatically updated sitemap for the custom part of the website and use this combined with the sitemap from the yoast plugin. You can upload both separated in Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure both got their own URL. In this case it’s all automated and is just as good as the previous method.
2. Keep on updating your sitemap manually. Just make sure you don't use the yoast sitemap and include the blogposts in your sitemap from screaming frog since this would give double input. If you choose to refresh your sitemap manually I would disable the sitemap within the Yoast plugin and use the Screaming frog sitemap which should include your blog pages aswell.

Good luck and let me know if this works for you!

[edward-may]

Oh you are a genius yourself Bob Thanks for the great information!

I will look into this and let you know how I go, thanks a bunch you have really helped me move this along and weed out all the confusion!

[Bob_van_Biezen]

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[Bob_van_Biezen]

Glad it was useful!