Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site. Webmaster Tools’ Sitemaps feature gives you feedback on your submitted Sitemaps, such as how many Sitemap URLs have been indexed, or whether your Sitemaps have any errors. Recently, we’ve added even more information! Let’s check it out:
The Sitemaps page displays details based on content-type. Now statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News are featured prominently. This lets you see how many items of each type were submitted (if any), and for some content types, we also show how many items have been indexed. With these enhancements, the new Sitemaps page replaces the Video Sitemaps Labs feature, which will be retired.
Another improvement is the ability to test a Sitemap. Unlike an actual submission, testing does not submit your Sitemap to Google as it only checks it for errors. Testing requires a live fetch by Googlebot and usually takes a few seconds to complete. Note that the initial testing is not exhaustive and may not detect all issues; for example, errors that can only be identified once the URLs are downloaded are not be caught by the test.
In addition to on-the-spot testing, we’ve got a new way of displaying errors which better exposes what types of issues a Sitemap contains. Instead of repeating the same kind of error many times for one Sitemap, errors and warnings are now grouped, and a few examples are given. Likewise, for Sitemap index files, we’ve aggregated errors and warnings from the child Sitemaps that the Sitemap index encloses. No longer will you need to click through each child Sitemap one by one.
Finally, we’ve changed the way the “Delete” button works. Now, it removes the Sitemap from Webmaster Tools, both from your account and the accounts of the other owners of the site. Be aware that a Sitemap may still be read or processed by Google even if you delete it from Webmaster Tools. For example if you reference a Sitemap in your robots.txt file search engines may still attempt to process the Sitemap. To truly prevent a Sitemap from being processed, remove the file from your server or block it via robots.txt.
For more information on Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools and how Sitemaps work, visit our Help Center. If you have any questions, go to Webmaster Help Forum.
The vertical axis of the bar charts should use zero for their origin. I have 5800 indexed pages out of 5900 submitted, but the difference looks grossly exaggerated because of the scale used.
ReplyDeleteScreenshot
how do you now resubmit a sitemap if you have amended it?
ReplyDeleteor do you just wait for it to be picked up again?
@Dave Ashworth
ReplyDeleteAfter amending a sitemap you can just wait for it to be picked up automatically.
Or you can click on it in Webmaster Tools and then click the red RESUBMIT SITEMAP button.
You can also ping your sitemap by entering http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.my-domain.com/my-sitemap.xml in your browser.
So what does it mean if it saying "Pending"?
ReplyDelete@Hometipster , If you mean under the "indexed" column, it means your pages are being (re-)processed. Make sure you don't have the warning triangle between the sitemap number and name. If you do, there are errors, if not you probably made changes to the sitemap and a number of pages are being re-crawled and indexed.
ReplyDeleteThis gives great visibility to the number of items we have crawled and indexed.
prior to this refresh of the sitemaps UI, I had been tracking the percentage of pages indexed. i have screenshots across 5mos that show as much as 96% of my sitemap links being indexed.
ReplyDeleteafter the the UI refresh, I'm seeing much lower index rate.yesterday it was down to 71% and this morning its at 51%.
anyone else seeing their index rate drop like a rock since this UI refresh? if so, have you found an explanation anywhere? thanks in advance.
@TechOnWeb I too am seeing a much lower rate of indexed pages. On one of my sites the sitemap used to be, approximately, 90+% of all pages indexed, Now it has dropped to around 25% - that's a little bit of a concern to say the least.
ReplyDeleteI'm also finding it frustrating that there is no longer the easy option of simply ticking the box next to the appropriate sitemap and hitting "resubmit". Instead I have to either hit the "Test/Send Sitemap" button and then type or cut & paste the path there, then submit it or use the browser to submit the URL of each sitemap as an appended query string.
Additionally, as a news publisher since 2007, I used to be happy that Google would know about a new URL through my updating of the sitemap as soon as I published a news article. I would submit and it would soon be crawled and indexed, a particularly pleasing feture for the nature of news stories, But now I am not so sure of the system.
This is not at all user friendly and I think it's a huge backward step from the easy way in which I used Google Webmaster Tools before. Google are bigger than I am, I am just one publisher, albeit one that spends thousands on AdWords too, but this is something I have deep reservations about.
Some other issues that I also find peculiar are that Google Webmaster Tools now shows errors that weren't indicated in the previous version of tools. This *is* good but when only 3 errors are detailed but the tools say there are more than that, I would like to know what they *all* are so that I can correct them all in one session rather than having to wait, come back, correct three more etc ad verbatim until my sitemap is 100% correct.
ReplyDeleteI *could* pick through my sitemaps looking for duplicates but, as a commercial website, I would prefer it if I didn't have to "waste" precious time constantly revisiting my sitemaps to clean up errors. My #1 sitemap *still* has a warning triangle beside it since I started using the new sitemaps tool and I am concerned this may adversely affect my website.
Any help or pointers would be greatly and gratefully received :)
I've noticed a discrepancy in the data as well. For example, when I'm in the main sitemap screen, it will say for example, 50k submitted, 30k indexed, but when I drill down into the individual feeds, it will only show 30 or so indexed. Confusing.
ReplyDeleteActually, I'm late to know this, when I check it from webmaster, I see my sitemap with orderby=updated is not listed. I don't know why?
ReplyDeleteAnd mobile sitemaps? they appear as Web !
ReplyDeleteWhats the best automatic tool to creat a XML sitemap for Google Webmaster? (Thas has been confirmed by google of course)
ReplyDeleteI was just waiting for the "Deletion" option in the sitemap tab of Google Webmaster tools..Thanks for this amazing move :)
ReplyDeleteHow come you do not mention the Geo-Sitemaps ? (kml files)
ReplyDeleteThe Resubmit Site Maps button was removed. I assume now we just wait for it to check the Site Maps again to see if they have changed? If so does anyone know how often they might check it? I update my Site Maps weekly and would hit the resubmit button after doing so but I am not sure what the best approach is now?
ReplyDelete@Bryn I've got a number of sitemaps for one website and the way to resubmit them now appears to be that we go to the sitemaps index page, where we see "ADD/TEST SITEMAP" as a red button in the top right hand corner, then click on the individual sitemap in the list and the red button changes to "RESUBMIT" then you should get a "REFRESH PAGE" prompt. Google then crawls the sitemap at its own pace but not as swiftly as it used to... :-/
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletegood blog boss....i love it...i haved 20 pages indexed but noting happen when i type keyword on google search....can you tell me what is wrong?....matur nuwun (thanks)
ReplyDeletenew sitemap is an intelligent tool
ReplyDeleteNice article i am very happy to see this.update my Site Maps weekly and would hit the resubmit.
ReplyDeleteWhat is not so good is the new limit on the number of sitemaps that Webmaster Tools will give information back on.
ReplyDeleteThe maximum appears to be 400 sitemaps. This equates to a maximum of 20m URLs.
One of the purposes of XML sitemaps was to help Google keep track of URLs on large sites.
I know only a few will be affected but it is very frustrating for those of us that are.
(BTW it looks currently as though we have another return of the GWT sitemaps error where certain files report "0" indexation when that is clearly not the case.)
is this works for blogspot
ReplyDeletewhat if i delete a sitemap which is already indexed & how many site maps can be submitted for one single website ?
ReplyDeletei submit my sitemap on google master tool with an http://example.webatu.com/index.php/en extension, and i change it into http://example.webatu.com/en! the old sitemap that i sent using index.php has many results on search engine, but when i replaced without index.php i got new results but the same content on google search engine! and now i got too many results on my website with the same content, the only difference are some had index.ph and some are none! could this be good or bad for my website? i want to delete some and only my homepage will remain, can anyone help me about this please???
ReplyDeleteI have a sitemap now but have added some pages. Do I:
ReplyDeletea. make a new sitemap and upload it including the new pages and and leave the other one in place too?
b. Upload the new one and delete the old one?
c. Ammend the old one to include the new pages?
from above post i really come to know that i may done mistakes which mention on last lines of post.
ReplyDeletei don't have much knowledge about Google webmaster tool how to use it.
i m confused in my sites's 2 simillar url :
http://highprsubmissionlist.com/sitemap - this url is not working and shown error-(Error loading stylesheet: A network error occurred loading an XSLT stylesheet:http://highprsubmissionlist.com/wp-content/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/sitemap.xsl)
And 2nd url is same just difference is of / after sitemap- http://highprsubmissionlist.com/sitemap/
And it is working well but not indexing. can u suggest me the right way to correct the problems
Why does Google only index 36 out of my 34 out of my 1196 URL's? Will it index them all in time? It is not reporting any errors in my Webmaster Tools page.
ReplyDeleteYoda ask some months ago about "Why the mobile sitemaps appear indexed as Web".
ReplyDeleteI have a url for mobile and it doesn't appear indexed as mobile url.
I don't understand why.
Yoda ask some months ago about the problems with sitemap for mobile browsers.
ReplyDeleteI have the same problem with my site and I don't understand why.
Can you help me about what is the problem with my site?
Why do I submit Sitemaps always pending indirect indexed
ReplyDeleteWhy do I submit Sitemaps always pending indirect indexed??
ReplyDeleteand what effect to site or blog if we re-submit the sitemap??
Thanks
It is helpful but to exclude sitemap but we can not totally delete the old sitemap still google find that from robots.txt so how we can remove??
ReplyDeleteGoogle is indexing the pages of my website that does not exists. For example mywebsite.com/5151511. Google has indexed thousands of pages like this. I am very worried about this, can someone tell me that why this is happening?
ReplyDelete