: Understanding Google Webmasters Tools Sitemaps Information So, I'm an 'avid' user of google webmaster tools and analytics. I'm building an e-commerce site, all with original product descriptions
So, I'm an 'avid' user of google webmaster tools and analytics. I'm building an e-commerce site, all with original product descriptions and a base of 'useful' industry-relevant content. I generated and submitted a new sitemap yesterday with some new content. Next to the sitemap in google webmaster tools, yesterday I had approx '600 urls in web index'. Today... 5. 5!?
There is no canocial issue, the site is configured properly to go to the non-www version, there are no 'spammy' links (probably no links at all at this stage...) and no duplicate or spammy content.
What has happened? To add further confusion, doing a site: search on google churns out 5.8k results, so it's still 'in the index', and monitoring certain keywords tells me that most of them still rank and rankings havent been changed... what is webmaster tools telling me by saying there are 5 urls in the web index?
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"5 URLs in web index" means that, of all of the pages in your current sitemap, only five of them appear in Google's index. This could be for a number of reasons:
You only have 5 URLs in your current sitemap. (If this is the case, '5 URLs in web index' is exactly what Webmaster Tools should be reporting.)
Some pages appear in your sitemap that Google hasn't crawled yet. Solution: wait.
Some pages appear in your sitemap that Google considers duplicate content. Solution: Check and fix duplicate content problems using a duplicate content tool. Check for duplicate page titles and descriptions in Webmaster Tools (under Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions). Check that all files which paginate, categorise, or present archives of content use the canonical tag.
Some pages appear in your sitemap as yoursite.com/page, but you're redirecting content to yoursite.com/page and dropping the www (or vice-versa). Google won't consider those pages to be in its web index because it sees URLs with 'www' as different from those without, even if the page itself is identical. [source]. Solution: If you're redirecting pages and stripping the 'www', make sure the pages are displayed without 'www' in your sitemap (and vice-versa).
Google can't crawl your sitemap or pages. Solution: Check and fix crawl errors (under Diagnostics > Crawl errors).
Google Webmaster Tools are having a bad day. (It happens.) Solution: wait.
The fact that the reported 'URLs in web index' figure dropped from 600 to 5 doesn't point to any one of these in particular, in my view, so it's worth running through all of them.
Probably a temporary issue. If your sitemap has been crawled correctly, your site still appears for a site: search and a keyword search, there is nothing to worry about.
There are many reason why there could be a discrepancy between the results from day to day. A few of theme are listed here on the Google Webmaster Central help forums:
www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=12785ecb88b7436d&hl=en
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