Normally i'm putting only important link inside my sitemap which right now they are about 3985 and google has indexed 3501 of them.
But the exact number of my links are over 100,000 and with each link there is an image that i show it to my users.
So, should i put all my links including my images inside my sitemap?
You are on the right path. Only put important links in your sitemap file. Fore more information perhaps check out the Google help page on the topic.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184&from=40318&rd=1
I would also check out the following link which describes sitemaps from a Google employee
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/30186/are-there-any-clear-indicators-that-my-sitemap-file-is-beneficial
Put every link you want search engines to crawl and index in your sitemap. That's the whole purpose of XML sitemaps, to tell search engines about your pages and images as well. 100,000 links and images are not a lot at all so don't worry about thinking Google will ignore your sitemap or be overwhelmed by it.
Related
I have a site with an input text.
User types the name of a city, hits enter and it's linked there.
my sitemap.xml looks like this:
<urlset>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/rome.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/london.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/newyork.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/paris.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/berlin.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/toronto.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/milan.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/edinburgh.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/nice.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/boston.html</loc></url>
...
</urlset>
My question is:
Will I be penalized (from a SEO point of view) because my links only appear on the sitemap.xml instead as in a list of anchors in the html page.
Note: the anchor approach was excluded because I have about 5,000 listed cities
It won't be penalised. Google themselves say the primary purpose of a sitemap is "a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover."
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en
You are rare in that you are using the sitemap correctly to help Google find your pages.
Often SEOs just add one for the sake of it, rather than taking the time to identify and using it to fix potential crawling errors.
The only negative aspect for SEO I can think of is that page rank will not flow between your pages if there is no direct link.
No, you will not be penalized. The sole purpose of sitemaps is to tell search engines where to find your content. That content may or may not be available through hyperlinks on your website.
We have a ton of content on our website which a user can get to by performing a search on the website. For example, we have data for all Public companies, in the form of individual pages per company. So think like 10,000 pages in total. Now in order to get to these pages, a user needs to search for the company name and from the search results, click on the company name they are interested in.
How would a search bot find this page? There is no page on the website which has links to these 10,000 pages. Think amazon, you need to search for your product and then from the search results, click on the product you are interested in to get to it.
The closest solution I could find was the sitemap.xml, is that it? Anything which doesn't require adding 10,000 links to an xml file?
You need to link to a page, or for it to be close to the homepage for it to stand a decent chance of getting indexed by Google.
A sitemap helps, sure, but a page still needs to exist in the menu / site structure. A sitemap reference alone does not guarantee a resource will be indexed.
Google - Webmaster Support on Sitemaps: "Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it."
If you browse Amazon, it will be possible to find 99% of the products available. Amazon do a lot of interesting stuff in their faceted navigation, you could write a book on it.
Speak to an SEO or a usability / CRO expert - they will be able to tell you what you need to do - which is basically create a user friendly site with categories & links to all your products.
An XML sitemap pretty much is your only on-site option if you do not or cannot link to these products on your website. You could link to these pages from other websites but that doesn't seem like a likely scenario.
Adding 10,000 products to an XML sitemap is easy to do. Your sitemap can be dynamic just like your web pages are. Just generate it on the fly when requested like you would a regular web page and include whatever products you want to be found and indexed.
I hope my question is not too irrelevant to stackoverflow.
this is my website: http://www.rader.my
It's a car information website. The content is dynamic. Therefore, google crawler could not find all the cars specification pages in my website.
I created a sitemap with all my cars URL in it (for instance: http://www.rader.my/Details.php?ID=13 is for one car). I know I haven't made any mistake in my .xml file format and structure. But after submission, google only indexed one URL which is my index.php.
I have also read about rel="canonical". But I don't think in my case I should use such a thing since all my pages ARE different with different content but only the structure is the same.
Is there anything that I missed? Why google doesn't accept my URLs even though the contents are different? What can I do to fix this?
Thanks and regards,
Amin
I have a similar type of site. Google is good about figuring out dynamic sites. They'll crawl the pages and figure out the unique content as time goes on. Give it time.
You should do all the standard things:
Make sure each page has a unique H1 tag.
Make sure each page has substantial unique content
Unique keywords and description tags aren't as useful as they used to be but they can't hurt.
Cross-link internally. Create category pages that include links to all of one manufacturer and have each of the pages of that manufacturer link back to 'similar' pages.
Get links to your pages. Nothing helps getting indexed like external authority.
I'm working on improving the site for the SEO purposes and hit an interesting issue. The site, among other things, includes a large directory of individual items (it doesn't really matter what these are). Each item has its own details page, which is accessed via
http://www.mysite.com/item.php?id=item_id
or
http://www.mysite.com/item.php/id/title
The directory is large - having about 100,000 items in it. Naturally, on any of the pages only a few items are listed. For example, on the main site homepage, there are links to about 5 or 6 items, from some other page there links to about a dozen different items, etc.
When real users visits the site, they can use search form to find item by keyword or location - so there would be a list produced matching their search criteria. However when, for example, a google crawler visits the site, it won't even attempt to put a text into the keyword search field and submit the form. Thus as far as the bot is concern, after indexing the entire site, it has covered only a few dozen items at best. Naturally, I want it to index each individual item separately. What are my options here?
One thing I considered is to check the user agent and IP ranges and if the requestor is a bot (as best I can say), then add a div to the end of the most relevant page with links to each individual item. Yes, this would be a huge page to load - and I'm not sure how google bot would react to this.
Any other things I can do? What are best practices here?
Thanks in advance.
One thing I considered is to check the user agent and IP ranges and if
the requestor is a bot (as best I can say), then add a div to the end
of the most relevant page with links to each individual item. Yes,
this would be a huge page to load - and I'm not sure how google bot
would react to this.
That would be a very bad thing to do. Serving up different content to the search engines specifically for their benefit is called cloaking and is a great way to get your site banned. Don't even consider it.
Whenever a webmaster is concerned about getting their pages indexed having an XML sitemap is an easy way to ensure the search engines are aware of your site's content. They're very easy to create and update, too, if your site is database driven. The XML file does not have to be static so you can dynamically produce it whenever the search engines request it (Google, Yahoo, and Bing all support XML sitemaps). You can find out mroe about XML sitemaps at sitemaps.org.
If you want to make your content available to search engines and want to benefit from semantic markup (i.e. HTML) you should also make sure your all of content can be reached through hyperlinks (in other words not through form submissions or JavaScript). The reason for this is twofold:
The anchor text in the links to your items will contain the keywords you want to rank well for. This is one of the more heavily weighted ranking factors.
Links count as "votes", especially to Google. Links from external websites, especially related websites, are what you'll hear people recommend the most and for good reason. They're valuable to have. But internal links carry weight, too, and can be a great way to prop up your internal item pages.
(Bonus) Google has PageRank which used to be a huge part of their ranking algorithm but plays only a small part now. But it still has value and links "pass" PageRank to each page they link to increasing the PageRank of that page. When you have as many pages as you do that's a lot of potential PageRank to pass around. If you built your site well you could probably get your home page to a PageRank of 6 just from internal linking alone.
Having an HTML sitemap that somehow links to all of your products is a great way to ensure that search engines, and users, can easily find all of your products. It is also recommended that you structure your site so more important pages are closer to the root of your website (home page) and then as you branch out gets to sub pages (categories) and then to specific items. This gives search engines an idea of what pages are important and helps them organize them (which helps them rank them). It also helps them follow those links from top to bottom and find all of your content.
Each item has its own details page, which is accessed via
http://www.mysite.com/item.php?id=item_id
or
http://www.mysite.com/item.php/id/title
This is also bad for SEO. When you can pull up the same page using two different URLs you have duplicate content on your website. Google is on a crusade to increase the quality of their index and they consider duplicate content to be low quality. Their infamous Panda Algorithm is partially out to find and penalize sites with low quality content. Considering how many products you have it is only a matter of time before you are penalized for this. Fortunately the solution is easy. You just need to specify a canonical URL for your product pages. I recommend the second format as it is more search engine friendly.
Read my answer to an SEO question at the Pro Webmaster's site for even more information on SEO.
I would suggest for starters having an xml sitemap. Generate a list of all your pages, and submit this to Google via webmaster tools. It wouldn't hurt having a "friendly" sitemap either - linked to from the front page, which lists all these pages, preferably by category, too.
If you're concerned with SEO, then having links to your pages is hugely important. Google could see your page and think "wow, awesome!" and give you lots of authority -- this authority (some like to call it link juice" is then passed down to pages that are linked from it. You ought to make a hierarchy of files, more important ones closer to the top and/or making it wide instead of deep.
Also, showing different stuff to the Google crawler than the "normal" visitor can be harmful in some cases, if Google thinks you're trying to con it.
Sorry -- A little bias on Google here - but the other engines are similar.
I am a beginner web developer and i have a site JammuLinks.com, it is built on php. It is a city local listing search engine. Basically i've written search pages which take in a parameter, fetch the records from the database and display it. So it is dynamically generating the content. However if you look at the bottom of the site, i have added many static links where i have hard coded the parameters in the link like searchresult.php?tablename='schools'. So my question is
Since google crawls the page and also the links listed in the page, will it be crawling the results page data as well? How can i identify if it has. So far i tried site:www.jammulinks.com but it results the homepage and the blog alone.
What more can i add to make the static links be indexed by it as well.
The best way to do this is to create a sitemap document (you can even get the template from Google's webmaster portion of their sites, www.google.com/webmasters/ I believe).