{"id":291,"date":"2006-01-31T15:07:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-31T19:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/have-sitemaps-killed-my-site-interesting-thread-in-webmasterworld\/"},"modified":"2012-09-20T04:58:12","modified_gmt":"2012-09-20T08:58:12","slug":"have-sitemaps-killed-my-site-interesting-thread-in-webmasterworld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/have-sitemaps-killed-my-site-interesting-thread-in-webmasterworld\/","title":{"rendered":"Have Sitemaps killed my site? – interesting thread in webmasterworld"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting thread in webmasterworld.com was discussing about a site’s pages which went URL only after signing up for google sitemaps, so did google sitemaps affect his site’s indexing of pages,<\/p>\n

Webmasterworld.com member mrmister says<\/p>\n

“I noticed that there are about 8 pages that are URL only. I’ve never seen this happen before. I did a standard Google search for my “green widgets” category page by searching for [green widgets]. It used to appear somewhere on page 1 but it was no longer there. I clicked to page 2 and I found my “history of green widgets” page sitting at the top of page 2. The “history of green widgets” page is the only subcategory page that is still listed as non-URL only. I checked my logs and Google has yet to crawl this page.
The site itself is a small site (about 80 pages). It’s been going in various guises for about 10 years and therefore has a fair amount of inbound links (mainly to internal pages rather than the home page). For most categories it gets to page 1 of the SERPs for two work keyphrases. I gave it a design overhaul about a year back to convert it from tag soup to clean valid HTML and CSS. I changed the linking structure and the URLs using 301s. I also improved the prominence of Adsense ads (that I’d been trailing for about a year previous) It weathered the change fine (some previous number 1 results dropped down a few places but nothing major).
There have been no major changes since then. I’ve added a few categories. It’s all been fine, every page has been indexed in a timely fashion.
However a week ago, I signed up to Google Sitemaps. I am wondering if this is connected in any way with the URL-only pages that I’m starting to see. “<\/p>\n

So what could have caused this, Submitting to google sitemaps might have been a coincidence,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting thread in webmasterworld.com was discussing about a site’s pages which went URL only after signing up for google sitemaps, so did google sitemaps affect his site’s indexing of pages, Webmasterworld.com member mrmister says “I noticed that there are about 8 pages that are URL only. I’ve never seen this happen before. I did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-webmaster-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1443,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions\/1443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}