Where did all my indexed pages go ??

Hi Guys, Nice to be a part of your community,

I have a question that I have been searching for an answer for some time and I hope you guys can give it to me.

I have a site built around Cubcart. My site was indexed with google around 600 odd pages when I type the site: command to see how many pages there were. I was recieving around 30+ hits every day from google searches and then all of a sudden it stopped, Down to 2 to 5 every day. I checked my site map and it some how dissapeard so I created an updated map and uploded it to google 2 days ago it now states

But when I check the stats again I only have 1 page indexed where as before I had over 600 can somone please explain to me how this works and how I can get my googleing happening again

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers Richard

 

Well after some research on the forum and finding this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=100844
I removed my site map and viola 2200 pages indexed within 5 hours.

The way I see google site maps working is that It comes along and grabs the .xml file reads the links indexes, checks urls exist then moves along it does not actually crawl the page, thus missing all the content of the page and alot of key words. Its a quicker way of google crawling more sites with less effort and far less effective than no site map at all.

In short I have had a site map on my site for 1 month made several different ones by different software and made zip difference as soon as I remove it BANG it indexes correctly.

My advice give the site maps a miss.

 

There are a lot of factors behind this and without looking at your site, there is absolutely no way to tell what happened. I do know that my own experience has been very good and that my newest pages are indexed within 2-3 days after I submit my sitemap to Google.

Some common issues are malformed sitemaps (have you validated yours?), correcting 404 pages that often-times return a 200 HTTP status to Google until Goog throws an error about this, impatience as Google processes the sitemaps and websites they belong to at first, sitemaps that contain URLs that are normally blocked by robots.txt or otherwise unreachable pages, lastmod times that don't match, priority 1.0 for all pages, no priority for pages, listing the same page under different URLs because of sort direction and criteria.

The Google sitemaps program is a tool and nothing more. Used incorrectly for any reason and your results may not be the best with it. Used correctly and it can help you.

I use sitemaps on several of my sites and they all have every page indexed. Usually within 2-3 days my newest forum posts and blog entries are listed.