Mistake I made with Google Sitemap submission

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I have Google Webmaster tools set up and submitted my sitemap. It looked (to me) that all was OK, but I noticed that my pages weren't appearing in the Google search index.

Webmaster tools was giving me details about traffic, but when I used the "site:www.webaddress.com" command very few of my pages were coming up.

The problem was that I had submitted to webmaster tools the domain "www.mysite.com" whereas my site was actually "http://mysite.com"

I don't really understand why this made a difference, but after resubmitting my site with the http verision, Google began indexing my pages.

Perhaps others can explain better than me why this makes a difference to Google.

I just want to make sure that no-one else make this same mistake as the sooner Google indexes your pages the quicker you will start to rank in the search results.

Hope this makes sense!!

John

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Recent Comments

6

Hi, I have a question on this. I want to add the www version. It told me to download a file which I did. Then I have to upload this file to my website. But, how do I upload the file?

Hi Paula,

This video may be useful Hope it helps
Best wishes
John

Thanks john I will give it a go.

Great information. Thanks a bunch.

I recommend having both URLs added at Webmaster Tools, one with and one without www, Then be sure to select the search engine result PREFERENCE as the non-www version.

Webmaster Tools explains this in the welcome message when one first joins. This lets Google know that you own both addresses (google sees www and non-www as 2 separate sites).

WA hosting uses the non-www format, so that is why you were not being indexed.

Where both are added, after a while you will notice that the statistics are almost exactly the same for both sites.

However, the world won't end if you add just the non-www. Some people don't bother adding both. I've done so because Google told me to do so...lol.

If one changes hosting, and the new host uses www in the URL, then the problem would resurface unless you had both versions ~Jude

Hi Jude,

I missed the welcome message and only submitted the www version so I think I delayed my pages/posts being indexed.

I have both variants registered now and set up my preferred version as the non www.

Just hope that others didn't do what I did and solely registered the wrong variant!

Thanks for helping!
Best wishes
John

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