Acid-Lounge.com

I recently found one of my sites had this error on google sitemaps. At first i couldnt work out why, less than half the site was indexed and google was rejecting the xml sitemap. In the end i realised what the issue was, i had set the site up with multiple sub-directories and had the menu written to link to each of the sub-directories as per below:



Then inside the directory folder 1 was an index.php page.

Whilst this worked fine in practise, it was clearly disliked by google as i presume it considers this a 301 redirect to the index file.

To avoid this, i simple changed the menu to read:



Problem solved, the XML sitemap passed first time, i should think the rest of the site will begin to index fairly soon now, fingers crossed.

Yes, a sitemap should list pages, not folders, even if the only file in the folder is the default index.

Don't make Google guess where your pages are with a sitemap. The purpose of the sitemap is to tell Google exactly where pages are. If you are not going to do that, then you are better off without a sitemap at all.

Ofc April, its just not something i considered when i built the site, figured i would post it so other beginers like myself dont get caught out!

As a brief followup to this thread, 4 days after fixing the issues mentioned, i now have the site fully indexed. There was 160 pages indexed, now, i have 380 pages indexed. Just goes to show what a small error can cause!