Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Charles Lee on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/18/2013).

I only have 113 pages, 243 posts, but in WMT, it reports 3513 web pages submitted

Hi Guys,

I`ve a Google Webmaster Tools sitemap question.

For my blog, my main sitemap is :
http:// (my url) /sitemap.xml

But with the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin, it generates another sitemap :
http:// (my url) /sitemap_index.xml

If you look at this sitemap_index.xml, it contains 7 individual sitemaps, ie. for post, page, attachments, categories and tags

I`ve actually already submitted some of them individually, (and included "feed" as well) and in my WMT account (screenshot attached), I can see that the webpages submitted and indexed are all summation of each other ie. I only have 113 pages articles, 243 posts articles, but in WMT, it reports 3513 web pages submitted.

Should I remove everything, start all over, and just submit the one created by wordpress (sitemap.xml) or should I submit the main one by Yoast (sitemap_index.xml) or it doesn`t matter now, since they are already indexed by Google already?

Thanks!
This question begins at 00:15:37 into the clip. Did this video clip play correctly? Watch this question on YouTube commencing at 00:15:37
Video would not load
I see YouTube error message
I see static
Video clip did not start at this question

YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Alistair Lattimore: Submitting both sets won't harm your site to the best of my knowledge but it won't help either.

    One benefit of submitting them separately is that you can see how Google is going with indexing each type of URL, whereas if you submit an index sitemap file - you see total indexed URLs but not broken down by type.

    Since you're not having indexing problems, for simplicity I'd just submit the Yoast index sitemap, which may already be referenced in your robots.txt file anyway.
  • Jim Munro: Hi Charles. :)

    You are welcome here but posts which contain links to your site are not. Normally this post would be removed but since Alistair has already responded, please edit your post to disable the links by using a space instead of a dot. +Charles Lee ;
  • Charles Lee: oh yes +Jim Munro ! You mentioned this before! forgot about the linking part!! I've swapped it out. Sorry about that!
  • Charles Lee: Thanks +Alistair Lattimore for the notes!
    I was afraid that it would harm because it could mean the pages/posts being listed twice (or more times) and Google might see them as duplicate posts..
  • Alistair Lattimore: That isn't going to happen Charles, as Google uses the XML sitemap documents as a suggestion/hint as to what URLs exist on your site that you want crawled.

    If you listed the same URL twice or a dozen times and Google does for some reason crawl the URLs more regularly because it is listed more than once (unlikely) -- you are still only listing the same URL over and over again and not a 'variation' of each of those URLs.

    In addition to that, even if each of the submitted duplicate URLs were in fact different in some way (for example they included a query string argument on each one that was different -- they don't but just as an example); your WordPress blog will more than likely have rel=canonical tags implemented throughout which will instruct Google to merge the duplicate URLs caused by the example query string variations into the base URL that WordPress knows about.

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/18/2013).

All Questions in this Hangout