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June 30, 2006

Is Google Sitemaps to Blame for Indexing Woes?

There is a WebmasterWorld thread named Removing the Google sitemap got all my pages indexed. People in that thread tend to be piggy backing off each-other, saying that after removing their Google sitemaps file from the Google Sitemaps product, their indexing issues (i.e. pages being in the supplemental index) have improved or more stabilized.

Should Google Sitemaps be blamed or attributed to the improvement on ones indexing in Google?

Reviewing these cases in the threads, without specific evidence or examples, I strongly feel Google Sitemaps is not the issue here. Many other sites have recently improved in terms of not displaying the "supplemental result" near the search listing during the time frame of this thread.

I believe this is just one of those common cases of timing and coincidence.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.



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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at June 30, 2006 7:32 AM Comments (2)

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Comments

I don't think so, that removing google sitemap will help in indexing all supplement pages. Then, why Google would represent the Google Sitemap Concept to Webmasters.

Google Sitemap is an XML feed of your all website pages for better indexing. That's my view.

Regards,
Amit Verma

 

Posted by Amit Verma at June 30, 2006 08:10

We've had ongoing discussions about this at HighRankings for the past couple of weeks.

The only way to show cause and effect is for people who have apparently lost indexed pages to do the following:

1) Delete the sitemap from their Google Sitemaps account

2) After their pages appear in the index, resubmit the sitemap

3) If their pages vanish from the index again (they should confirm this by checking over a period of 2-3 days on several data centers), then delete the sitemap again

4) Let everyone know if their pages come back into the index

So far, I haven't been able to entice anyone into doing this.

It is not enough that people remove those sitemaps and then see their pages snap back. Even if 1,000 people report the same effect, we don't know the cause. You can only show what the cause is by repeating the process over and over again, so that it is clearly predictable.

 

Posted by Michael Martinez at June 30, 2006 12:19

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