Sitemap issues 19 warnings
-
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
-
Glad it was useful!
-
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!
-
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:
- 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.
- 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!
-
Thanks a lot Dirk, your help has been tremendous to my SEO efforts!!!
-
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!
-
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
-
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!
-
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. _
-
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.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
A website with some guidelines points similar - is this creates an issue?
Hey Guys, Please clarify my doubt at the earliest. We just revamped the website with new content and hired a content writer for our services page to make it done. I just came across with 2 pages with similar guidelines over the content. These are the pages showing some similarity of bulletins. Please take a look on it and give the reply, it creates any ranking issues or not. Page-1: https://www.socprollect-mea.com/business-setup-in-ajman/ Page-2: https://www.socprollect-mea.com/business-registration-in-ajman-free-zones/ Reply ASAP
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nazfazy0 -
Chrome79 shows warning on our domain "Did you mean...?" another website
On Chrome79 a large scary warning is shown to users on our site: "Did you mean this other domain? This site's domain looks similar to X domain. Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making small, hard-to-see changes to the domain." Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/NOGEyLM Our online business is reputable, no black hat SEO practices, has been established since the early 2000s, with a relatively high DA. We don't have any warnings / manual actions in Google Search Console so I can't request a review there. I've reported it several weeks ago to Google's Incorrect Phishing Warning but the warning continues to display. I reported using: google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/ Does the Moz community have any suggestions on how to fix this or general thoughts? Thanks! NOGEyLM
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sb10300 -
Moz was unable to crawl your site? Redirect Loop issue
Moz was unable to crawl your site on Jul 25, 2017. I am getting this message for my site: It says "unable to access your homepage due to a redirect loop. https://kuzyklaw.com/ Site is working fine and last crawled on 22nd July. I am not sure why this issue is coming. When I checked the website in Chrome extension it saysThe server has previously indicated this domain should always be accessed via HTTPS (HSTS Protocol). Chrome has cached this internally, and did not connect to any server for this redirect. Chrome reports this redirect as a "307 Internal Redirect" however this probably would have been a "301 Permanent redirect" originally. You can verify this by clearing your browser cache and visiting the original URL again. Not sure if this is actual issue, This is migrated on Https just 5 days ago so may be it will resolved automatically. Not sure, can anybody from Moz team help me with this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CustomCreatives0 -
Duplicate Content issue in Magento
I am getting duplicate content issue because of the following product URL in my Magento store. http://www.sitename.com/index.php/sports-nutritions/carbohydrates http://www.sitename.com/sports-nutritions/carbohydrates Please can someone guide me on how to solve it. Thanks Guys
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | webteamBlackburn0 -
More sitemap issues: help
Hey Guys, Seems I'm having more sitemap issues -I just checked my WMT and find that for my com.au and com site - the com.au site is showing i only have 2 pages indexed and 72 Web Pages submitted. The .com I look under sitemaps and it doesn't show any results as to how many pages have been indexed instead it is giving me this error warning - "Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead." All 3 sites are listed here: http://bit.ly/1KTbWg0 http://bit.ly/1AU0f5k http://bit.ly/1yhz96v Any advice would be much appreciate here! Thanks guys
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Potential spam issue - back links
Hi - we have a client whom we work with for SEO. During a review we noticed in Webmaster Tools, there was an IP address with over 30,000 links to our clients site. The IP address is 92.60.0.123. From looking up the IP address details, it looks like it is based in Europe - but we are unable to establish what it is, where the links are and who created it. We are concerned it could be a potential spammer trying to cause an issue with the SEO campaign. Is there any way of finding out any more details apart from the basic information about the location of the IP address? Also - if we submit a disavow via webmaster tools, we are unsure what issue it will have on the clients site if we do not know what it is and the type of links it is creating. Any ideas? Thanks for your help! Phil.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Globalgraphics0 -
Partial Sitemaps Impact on SERP
I have a website having 20 different categories. But have the sitemap for only 1 category and rest 19 categories will not have the sitemaps will this have an impact on the search results on not
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seosogo0 -
Is widget linkbaiting a bad idea now that webmasters are getting warnings of unnatural links?
I was reading this article about how many websites are being deindexed because of an unnatural linking profile and it got me thinking about some widgets that I have created. In the example given, a site was totally deindexed and the author believes the reason was because of multiple footer links from themes that they created. I have one site that has a very popular widget that I offer to others to embed into their site. The embed code contains a line that says, "Tool provided by Site Name". Now, it just so happens that my site name contains my main keyword. So, if I have hundreds of websites using this tool and linking back to me using the same anchor text, could Google see this as unnatural and possibly deindex me? I have a few thoughts on what I should do but would love to hear your thoughts: 1. I could use a php script to provide one of several different anchor text options when giving my embed code. 2. I could change the embed code so that the anchor text is simply my domain name, ie www.mywebsitename.com rather than "my website name". Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarieHaynes1