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Sitemap - only 1 url of 8 indexed?

Hi

I use my website mainly as a portfolio to show to prospective clients, but I would also like it to appear in relevant search results. It was built using iWeb 08 and is hosted by GoDaddy.

I have followed the advice on this excellent forum and so now have the site verified by Google, and have managed to generate a sitemap (using Rage Sitemap Automator) and successfully submit it. BUT only the contents of the first page of my site are appearing in Google searches, and when I checked Google Webmaster, it says "URLs in sitemap total 8; indexed 1."

Can anyone help me work out where I have gone wrong please??

If it helps, the website is:
http://www.jillsinclair.net

Thanks.

iMac 24" 2.4GHz intel core duo 2, Mac OS X (10.6.2), iBook 1.2GHz Power PC G4

Posted on Jan 26, 2010 12:38 AM

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Posted on Jan 26, 2010 12:54 AM

This is the complete address:

http://www.jillsinclair.net/google43df4013bdf34296.html/LandscapeHistoryHome.html

Are you sure this is meant as a folder?

google43df4013bdf34296.html

It looks like a webpage to me.

And where is the Site folder iWeb creates? Did you use google43df4013bdf34296.html as the Site name in iWeb?

Nothing wrong with that, but you probably won't get the results you're after.

First do it right and then proceed from there.

And only use technology you really understand.

It's not an iWeb problem.
17 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Jan 26, 2010 12:54 AM in response to paris girl

This is the complete address:

http://www.jillsinclair.net/google43df4013bdf34296.html/LandscapeHistoryHome.html

Are you sure this is meant as a folder?

google43df4013bdf34296.html

It looks like a webpage to me.

And where is the Site folder iWeb creates? Did you use google43df4013bdf34296.html as the Site name in iWeb?

Nothing wrong with that, but you probably won't get the results you're after.

First do it right and then proceed from there.

And only use technology you really understand.

It's not an iWeb problem.

Jan 26, 2010 8:38 AM in response to paris girl

google43df4013bdf34296.html is a file that should be uploaded to your root folder on the server along with the sitemap.xml.

MobileMe users should upload them to Finder/Go/iDisk/My iDisk/Web/Sites. Then give Google etc the MobileMe URL to the sitemap which is .......

http://web.me.com/username/

Test this by entering into your browser.....

http://web.me.com/username/sitemap.xml

Note that if you have more than one site, the sitemaps need to have different names or ID numbers so that they don't overwrite each other - sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml etc - and the appropriate one entered into the Goggle dashboard and verified for each site.

Jan 26, 2010 8:47 AM in response to paris girl

Google will find and index all the pages of your website if:

- the page doesn't look suspicious or malicious
- it has decent content (including keywords)
- you haven't used any codes which block it from doing so.

You probably also helped by removing such a weird/random string from your URL already.

Submitting your sitemap to Google can be useful for Google to pick things up faster, but everything will be indexed anyway otherwise. I've never submitted a sitemap to Google and it picks up every single page of my website.

Jan 29, 2010 5:18 AM in response to paris girl

Thanks to everyone for their help. As a result of the feedback, I now have a more sensible URL and have put the HTML info where it belongs, in my root folder. Despite this, and having generated and successfully submitted a new sitemap a few days ago, Google is still only indexing one URL out of eight, and searching on Google only finds the first page of my website. Bizarrely, I've just searched with Yahoo, and that finds results on every page! So I guess there is something that Google just does not like.

If anyone can suggest anything else I might try, I'd be grateful.

Jan 29, 2010 2:01 PM in response to paris girl

I would imagine that it means the sitemap doesn't have enough info on it.
How are you creating the sitemap?
Can you send me the URL to it so that I can see it? Click my name in the sidebar to get my email if you don't want to publish it in the forum.
One cause of this problem is the use of the iWeb default navigation but I note that you have duplicated it in a text box at the bottom of the page to try to overcome this.
As far as SEO is concerned, its better to build your own custom navigation in a text box rather than use the default one or hide it in an HTML Snippet.

Sitemap - only 1 url of 8 indexed?

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