Question

I have created a sitemap for my site and it complies with the protocol set by http://www.sitemaps.org/

Google has been told about this sitemap via webmaster tools. It has tracked all the urls within the sitemap (500+ urls) but has only indexed 1 of them. The last time google downloaded the sitemap was on the 21st of Oct 2009.

When I do a google search for site:url it picks up 2500+ results.
Google says it can crawl the site.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why only 1 url is actually indexed?

Cheers,
James

Answer 1

First off, make sure Google hasn’t been forbidden from those pages using robots.txt, etc. Also make sure those URLs are correct. 🙂

Second, Google doesn’t just take your sitemap at face value. It uses other factors, such as inbound links, etc, to determine whether it wants to crawl all of the pages in your sitemap. The sitemap then serves mostly as a hint more than anything else (it helps Google know when pages are updated more quickly, for example). Get high-quality, relevant, useful links (inbound and outbound) and your site should start getting indexed.