Thursday, January 21, 2010
site: Searches and Webmaster Sitemap Reports
Having just completed the Google Webmasters Quiz I thought I would cover this point.
When you carry out a site:www.website.com search you can often see that the number of indexed pages differs from your Sitemap report in Google Webmaster Tools. This is because the Sitemap report only covers the URLs you’ve submitted in your Sitemap file. Your site: search covers whatever Google has in its index and the index can contain historical pages that no longer exist and, hopefully are now subject to a 301 redirect. Remember too that the site: search may not include pages you have recently added to your website. If you are using php on your website and have not used the canonical meta tag then you will have in the site: search many urls containing session ids which all point to the same page. This should indicate to you to implement the canonical meta tag. Multiple urls all pointing to the same page may result in duplication problems and in addition the benefit of incoming links to that page may be diluted over the various urls for that page.
Do also be aware that using the menu link for your home pages as /index.html will result in duplicate urls for your home page and again a dilution of the benefits of incoming links as some people will link to www.site.co.uk/index.html and some will link to just www.site.co.uk however both urls go to the same page, your home page. You can remedy this by ensuring that your menu link or home button link is www.site.co.uk/ or indeed just “/”.
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