If your website suffers from poor indexing, it is most likely not because of the weak content but because your sitemaps are a mess. No matter how good your website content, search engines only analyze sitemaps to understand what your website contains, which pages matter, and how they connect. And if a website’s sitemap is bloated, outdated, or misconfigured, search engines, e.g Google will simply ignore large parts of your site.
Today, we are going to point out the biggest reasons your sitemap is harming your indexing rate and you will be able to fix it.
Your Sitemap Consists of Pages That Shouldn’t Be Indexed In The First Place
Some businesses don’t even know that one of the most common SEO mistakes is including certain pages that shouldn’t be there. Adding following pages to your website’s sitemap confuses search engines and wastes allocated budget:
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- URLs with ‘noindex’ tags– Your sitemap is here to only list URLs that will be indexed in front of search engines. When you apply a ‘noindex’ tag either within a <meta> tag or ‘via HTTP’ response header, you’re clearly signalling to search engines that you prefer those pages not to be indexed. And it automatically confuses the sitemap. The best solution can be to exclude URLs like these from your sitemap.
- URLs with HTTP status codes-During audit of your website,it’s crucial to remove URLs returning non-200 response codes,such as redirection status codes (3xx), client error response codes (4xx), and server error response codes (5xx).
- Inapplicable orphan pages-Orphan pages are invisible to search engines unless you have a direct link to them. And due to this reason search engines may struggle to discover them. In some cases, it even removes them from their index altogether. During the audit, we suggest double-checking the need in certain orphan pages on your brand’s website.
The indicated pages are killing the indexing rate because they are taking space of the high-value pages, while not being of any use for the search engines.
Your Sitemap Has Issue With Content Splitting (Or Doesn’t Split at All)
The problem with sitemap splitting is always on agenda. Especially for the businesses, such as e-commerce, where the website showcases hundreds or thousands of products. The audit can determine whether you need one or more XML sitemaps. And if one sitemap is not enough, then you need to consider multip;e sitemaps for the smooth website operations. The following reasons can let you know if your side is on brick of audit for sitemap splitting:
a)Your website has more than 50,000 URLs you want indexed
b)Your brand’s website features lots of images and/or videos
c)Its content is news-oriented
d)The sitemap file size is over 50MB
If you don’t split up the sitemaps, Google may not crawl and index all your URLs. For example, if you’re running a news channel/blog, you need to daily update your website.Even if your sitemap doesn’t exceed the size limits, you can create an additional news sitemap.Because due to the lack of sitemap splitting, your content will not be shown to the audience at the right time and moment, because search engines cannot index your sitemaps. This will ensure your blog content gets indexed quickly while making it easier to track its performance with Google Search Console (GSC).
A broken sitemap can silently destroy your indexing rate-even if your site has incredible content. Structured Indexing and periodic audit of your website can help your business stay updated in online space and get visibility among potential customers. With Intactdia, your website will be skyrocketing in its business niche as never before. Our dedicated team of specialists remove low-value pages, keep your sitemap updated and Google will understand your website instantly.
