WMT only showing half of a newly submitted XML site map

[JSOC]

After upgrading design and theme on a relatively high traffic wordpress site, I created an XML site map through Yoast SEO since WP Engine didn't allow the old XML site map plugin I was using.

A site:www.mysite.com search shows Google is indexing about 1,100 pages on my site, yet the XML site map I submitted shows "458 URLs submitted and 467 URLs indexed."

These numbers are about 1/2 of what they should be. My old site map had about 1,100 URLs and 965 or so indexed (used noindex on some low value pages.)

Any ideas as to what may be wrong?

[AlanMosley]

Can we see your sitemap.xml to look for any problems.

I would not be concerned, as sitemaps are not much help for sites that have good linking, a site map should not include all your links according to Duane forrester of bing, but the main pages only.

What is a concern is the noindexing of pages you mention. any links pointing to non indexed pages are wasting their link juice, there is nothing to gain by noindexing pages but a lot to lose. if you really mush noindex a page use the meta tag noindex,foloow, so the search engine follows the links and you will get some of the link juice back.

[JSOC]

Thanks Alan,

Sure, here is the site map: http://www.nationalbankruptcyforum.com/sitemap_index.xml

As far as noindexing pages is concerned, I always use noindex, follow, but choose to noindex category and author archive pages as I think they can cause duplicate content/ Panda issues.

John

[AlanMosley]

You wont get a duplicate penalty, having duplicate content is not a crime unless you are doing some large scale spamming. duplicate content wont help but it wont hurt either. noindexing will hurt, even with follow you still lose some. Use canonical to fix your problem not noindex.

as for the sitemap, It is my suspicion that not al the maps are being read. I also don't know much about yoast sitemaps, I always us the xml standard.

Bing and Google have their own sitmap generation software, that you can use that lets them make your site map for you.

http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2013/02/20/building-sitemaps-manually-stop-until-you-read-this.aspx

http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/

[KaneJamison]

I just did a site: search for your domain and looks like 1140 pages are indexed, so I'm assuming this got itself settled?

Congrats! Marking as answered.