Thread: Google Sitemap

I have a few questions with regard to the google sitemap.

First, I updated via webmaster tools and set the sitemap to googleindex.aspx.

Within a few minutes it recognized it and shows 3797 urls in the sitemap. However, it shows 0 as indexed.

The urls in the sitemap look odd .. basically I have thousands of entries like this.

Code:

googleentity.aspx?entityname=Category&entityid=100 Sitemap	Nov 10, 2009	9	0

Is this the way it should look, and any reason why they are not being indexed?

Thanks

give it time, it may take a couple days for the urls to get indexed.

What your looking at is a sitemap index file, which is basically a registry of entity links on your site following the sitemap protocol format.
Each entity link will eventually lead to the actual product/category/etc.. url.

Sitemap Protocol
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks Mark!

We have same problems too. It's been more that few months. We have submitted about 13,000 pages in the xml sitemap in google webmaster tool. ONly about 800 pages were indexed. I was looking at the pages that was not indexed, all the links were working properly. Is there any reason google is not indexing alot of these pages?? It seems like half of that pages submitted did not get indexed. Does anyone have any suggestion to fix this?

thank you.

Are they all unique pages with unique content? It's very possible that you have your site configured in such a way that many of your pages have duplicate content (or at least, what Google has flagged as duplicate content) in which case they may have not indexed the duplicate content pages.

Thanks, that's what I'm afraid of too. THere are many product pages that have same Meta titles and descriptoon, because it's in the same category, but different id numbers and pagenum in the url. But according to Google, that is still ok, they won't penalize you.