I’ve recently launched a site named IPhoneToPC for selling some affiliate iPhone Data Transfer Tools. On Aug 17, 2012 i had submitted my XML sitemap to google using Webmaster Tools. Now as per Google webmaster tools only 4 pages out of 10 are indexed. What’s wrong with other 6 pages? And also if i type
site:[noparse]www.iphone-to-pc.com[/noparse] in the browser it shows all the 10 pages of my site. Also when i try to check my site using cache: , it shows nothing. Is there anything wrong with my site or the navigation?
I’m really confused how many pages are indexed? Can anybody please help?
you have to no worry about it. your all ten pages are indexed by google. what google algorithm says that first websites pages are indexed after then it will be cached. it doe not mean that you had submitted xml site to google so all your pages has been cached.
Thanks for the reply. But why others pages like this one: [noparse]http://www.iphone-to-pc.com/iphone-mac-transfer.html[/noparse] shows up in the cache but not the home page? Also i want to know is it necessary to have htaccess file as i have not created any for my site?
[FONT=verdana]You submitted the sitemap on 17th August. That’s less than a week ago. I suggest you wait another week or two before you start worrying about this. The chances are that Google will get round to indexing the rest of the site by then.
because that page visibility more rather than home page. you don’t have to worry about this. you can not do anything. just try to promote your home page. no need to create htaccess file. its not related to google algorithm.
What you have to do is to check for errors on website and get the problem of “dual homepage” solved(you mentioned about it on other post). Then you can resubmit your website to Google under Google Webmaster Tool and once that is done, all the pages in your domain or website will be crawled. Make sure you have a sitemap else links to all pages on your homepage.
Actually, you don’t need links to all the pages from your home page. What you need is a set of links that will enable visitors to easily reach any of your content in the most obvious and intuitive manner. There is no requirement for them all to be on your home page. In fact, the home page has no special significance to the search engines in this regard.
If, for some reason, you can’t provide links to every page from within the site, then you will need a sitemap. But, if that’s not the case, a sitemap is not essential, and probably won’t make any difference to this particular problem.
Well finally Google Webmaster showing me that all the pages of my site are Indexed. Thanks for all the help guys. One more thing on which i need little help. Webmaster Tools showing me one crawl error: (404) not found :
www(dot)iphone-to-pc(dot)(com)/legal.aspx , but I’m not able to locate it. How to fix it and where i can get more details about this error in the webmaster tools?
[FONT=verdana]This would be because another page (either on your site or an external site) is incorrectly linking to that page. You need to figure out where the link is coming from, and then get it corrected.
But don’t spend a lot of time on it. These sort of invalid links are inevitable. They’re a minor nuisance, but they won’t hurt your search engine rankings.
On another point, you should consider creating a custom 404 error page. At present, any 404s on your site go to a page that’s provided by your hosting company (Justhost) and which is not giving you any benefit. Again, this has got nothing to do with SEO, but it will make life easier for your visitors if the error page gave them some help in finding other parts of your site. If you don’t know how to create a custom 404 error page, do a Google search or post a new question here in Sitepoint.
Most probably your site hasn’t been indexed yet. You need to wait a little longer. If your site doesn’t get indexed anytime in near future, make sure you haven’t used any robots.txt to disable indexing of your web pages.
Thanks great suggestion. I will create a custom 404 page for sure. I need your opinion on one more thing. First time when I’ve submitted sitemap of my site using Webmaster tools, i’ve got DNS error. Something like this
“Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1 errors while attempting to retrieve DNS information for your site. The overall error rate for DNS queries for your site is 50.0%. You can see more details about these errors in Webmaster Tools.”
So a per their recommendation i had words with customer care representative of my Web-Hosting provider. And he told me that there is something wrong with my htaccess file and asked me to delete it from the server. I did just what he suggested and now I’m not getting such errors. But still DNS status is showing something yellow colored warning sign, check the attached screenshot for more details. Is there still anything wrong?
Nick, I’m not sure about this, but I suspect the reason the yellow warning is still there is that GWM simply hasn’t got round to removing it. In general, GWM lags behind the real world by several days. Check again in a week’s time.
Thanks Mike, for your response. Actually, its compulsory that you have interlinked all pages to your homepage or the main page that you promote, so that when search engine spider lands on that particular page, it does have chance to crawl all the links on the website.
This can either be done by placing the major division or product pages links on the homepage and have the rest on the respective inner pages or have a link to a sitemap on the main page.
Timesheet, in what way is it “compulsory”? Who or what is compelling you? It’s your site, and it’s up to how or where you put your links.
You’re right that the search engine must be able to crawl the entire site in order to index it (if there isn’t a site map), so you do need every page to have a link pointing to it. But they don’t have to be linked directly from the home page. In fact, as I said before, the home page has no signficance to the search engines. It’s just another page.
Not if you have a link from an existing page to the new page. You only need to re-submit the sitemap if the search engine bot wouldn’t be able to find the new page on its own (that is, by following links).
Do we need to create separate XML sitemap for sub-domains also? For example if my site is: example(dot)com and the sitemap for this site is example(dot)com/sitemap.xml
Now I want to create sub-domain for this site like abc(dot)example(dot)com, do I need to create separate sitemap for this subdomain like abc(dot)example(dot)com/sitemap.xml or it will be enough to include this URL in my main website sitemap?
I agree with everyone else, this is not something you need to worry about. It may take a week or two for google to completely index all your websites so take it easy. Do understand to make your website easily reachable for not only the audience but also for google. It’s right that each page should be indexed separately
