[quote name=‘windowleaper’]I am confused now and not sure if this is a CS CART or Google issue. I Turned off the SEO and sitemap addon. Then submitted a new sitmap with the non seo’d URL’s to Google manually.
Result!
The number of pages indexed did not change!
Now is Google not indexing the pages due to content because their criteria has changed or is it not indexing them because of the fact the pages are classed as “too deep” or another reason such as page rank, links etc? Either way something is stopping Google indexing pages that previously it had done!
If any one out there can shed any light on this as I think there is a bunch of us here who need assistance?[/QUOTE]
When you updated to 2.1.1 did you change the url structure of your products? or where they kept the same?
If the URL structure of some of your pages has changed it could take a few weeks for all the pages to be indexed, and anything up to 6 months for you to start seeing them higher up in google, you should put some rewrites in place if you have changed the url structure.
You will also have to be careful how often you submit your sitemap, if you keep submitting it (even while trying to figure out this issue) google could penalise you meaning it would take even longer for your website to be indexed.
I personally use 2.1.1 on a live store and only have seen improvement in my rank / positioning since updating.
Another thing google do like is unique content, the more unique content you have the higher you will rank.
I’ve found the best way over my years of work in the web development and seo industry that to rank high in google, bing, yahoo etc is to just build your website with the users/customers in mind, keep the code clean and to web standards and you should never really get any problems.
You should try running your website through google webmaster tools as this will help you diagnose any problems and also will tell you if google have penalised you for anything.
Hope this helps some.[/QUOTE]
I didn’t get round to upgrading from 2.0.15 as there was so many problems in 2.1.0 that affected my other site so my URL structures are unchanged.
I have also made sure my content is unique so this should help.
Where do I look in Google Webmaster to see if i have been penalised? I can find that. Thanks for the tip on not submitting a sitemap too often I didn’t know.
If you disable seo and want to use sitemap.xml, then you must edit .htaccess file in the cs-cart root per cs-cart instruction and clear the cache before creating sitemap.xml
[quote name=‘windowleaper’]Sorry I am new to all this which file are you referring to in A?
I think I understand what you are asking for B) and in google wemaster i set it to Sitemap.xml.
Sorry, it is in Spanish, basically it says “an element can not be found”
Please, help me with this![/QUOTE]
We had this same error and it was because the XML file was not valid. Meaning that it ended with a tag and not . I didn’t know why this was happening, so I played with the settings in the Google Sitemap addon and removed the “News settings” and “Extended feature pages settings” from the sitemap. I don’t know what “Extended feature pages settings” is and we don’t use the CSC News addon so I thought disabling these wouldn’t matter for us.
After I did that, the Sitemap generated correctly with the ending tag. So in your case I would be sure the XML is valid first and then work down from there.
[quote name=‘mirnitagl’]ahhh! ok, thanks for clearing that up. As you can see I have no idea
I see that main url has priority 1 and others priority 0.5 , should that be changed?
Is there anything wrong you noticed in my sitemap or that could be improved? Thanks for checking and giving me a hand! ;)[/QUOTE]
Wikipedia has a good page on sitemaps and what the tags mean.
There’s nothing that you can “improve” in a sitemap, it is what it is which is simply a map of your page URL’s in a XML file. If you’ve set your site up properly the sitemap should have everything in it. A simple test is to go to the home page in the admin panel and see how many Active Items you have. You should have at least that number of tags in your sitemap.
Also, you asked about items being indexed. According to Google:
[QUOTE]
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.
[/QUOTE]
and I have no idea how or why some pages are indexed and others are not. It’s the Google “black magic” at work again.
I have the same problem: Google index the categories and sub categories only. Very few product pages indexed. Before upgraded to 2.1. Goole indexed all pages. I sumbited sitemap.xml to google again and again, no improvement.