Sitemaps and Internal Links

[Charles Butler]

Hello,

Before I get started, I just want to say that I have posted this in the SEO forums, but all of my responses were the same and did not answer my question at all, so I would aprreciate it if someone here is able to help me more than they did.

I created my sitemap manually (every single response in the other forum was to generate one, and this is not even my question!) and here are my sitemap stats in google webmaster tools:

Total URLs: 1,047
Indexed URLs: 1

In the footer of each of my pages I have a link to my homepage.

My question is: I want to know if Google will eventually crawl these pages now that it knows that they exist, and how long does it take for the internal links to show up? I just need to make sure that I am doing this correctly and any helpful advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks again!

[DavidTheMavin]

It will probably crawl them in a day or so, and then you'll see details in your webmaster tools to see if there were any problems (click the details link I believe). Don't expect to have them all indexed though, unless your site is the craziest awesomest site ever.

What do you mean by "how long does it take the internal links to show up"? What internal links, show up where, show up for what? I may have answered this question already, but if not I'll need more info

[Randy Bheites]

Originally Posted by Charles Butler

My question is: I want to know if Google will eventually crawl these pages now that it knows that they exist, and how long does it take for the internal links to show up? I just need to make sure that I am doing this correctly and any helpful advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks again!

Yes, Google will index your pages.

It will take however long it takes, it's up to Google. Probably at least a couple of weeks if your site is brand new.

If you want to 'suggest' to Google that they index faster, sign up for their Webmaster Central area and submit your sitemap location there. They will immediatly verify it and crawl it.

[ATV]

personally I do not think sitemaps are that important if you have good internal linking throughout your websites.

If you want to get indexed faster, you should work on internal linking.

GL

[Charles Butler]

Thank you for the fast responses, the sooner I know how to do this, the better

Originally Posted by DavidTheMavin

It will probably crawl them in a day or so, and then you'll see details in your webmaster tools to see if there were any problems (click the details link I believe). Don't expect to have them all indexed though, unless your site is the craziest awesomest site ever.

What do you mean by "how long does it take the internal links to show up"? What internal links, show up where, show up for what? I may have answered this question already, but if not I'll need more info

In webmaster tools, they have a section for showing you how many internal links that you have. I wanted to know if the internal links will show up in the internal links section over time. I am not trying to get every page indexed, I just want google to know how many pages my websites have, crawl them and have it count my links to my homepage as internal links. I wanted to know if sitemaps accomplish that objective.

Originally Posted by ATV

personally I do not think sitemaps are that important if you have good internal linking throughout your websites.

If you want to get indexed faster, you should work on internal linking.

GL

My site is already indexed and ranked for some pages (not for keywords that I am trying to rank for, but a ranking is a ranking for now) and I agree that sitemaps wont be super useful if you have good internal linking, but this website is not linked internally all that well imo and here's google's take on sitemaps:


Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

My top competitor has about 1,400 backlinks according to Yahoo Site Explorer, and about 1,200 come from its own website's product pages. I am working towards doing the same thing to ultimately take the #1 spot for each of the keywords that it holds.

If having a sitemap helps google look at my own product pages and counts every link to the homepage as an internal link, then I think I will be fine, I just need to know if Google will crawl them at its own leisure, which I think the answer for is yes.

But if I am mistaken, or if anybody can offer some more tips on internal linking you would be my knight in shining armor so to speak

Anyways, thanks for all the help so far - you are way more of a help than the SEO forum imho

[Brett Topovski]

I would be happy to take a look at your website a evaluate it for important internal search engine optimization factors.

I can also analyze how how Google will spider your links.

What is your domain name?

Kind Regards,

[DavidTheMavin]

Ok, I see what you're saying about the internal links, but the thing you need to remember is Web tools is not that accurate and is always behind by a week or more. All those stats are there to give you a ROUGH idea of what is going on with your site and how Google views your site, links etc.

Originally Posted by Charles Butler

Thank you for the fast responses, the sooner I know how to do this, the better



In webmaster tools, they have a section for showing you how many internal links that you have. I wanted to know if the internal links will show up in the internal links section over time. I am not trying to get every page indexed, I just want google to know how many pages my websites have, crawl them and have it count my links to my homepage as internal links. I wanted to know if sitemaps accomplish that objective.



My site is already indexed and ranked for some pages (not for keywords that I am trying to rank for, but a ranking is a ranking for now) and I agree that sitemaps wont be super useful if you have good internal linking, but this website is not linked internally all that well imo and here's google's take on sitemaps:


Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

My top competitor has about 1,400 backlinks according to Yahoo Site Explorer, and about 1,200 come from its own website's product pages. I am working towards doing the same thing to ultimately take the #1 spot for each of the keywords that it holds.

If having a sitemap helps google look at my own product pages and counts every link to the homepage as an internal link, then I think I will be fine, I just need to know if Google will crawl them at its own leisure, which I think the answer for is yes.

But if I am mistaken, or if anybody can offer some more tips on internal linking you would be my knight in shining armor so to speak

Anyways, thanks for all the help so far - you are way more of a help than the SEO forum imho

[Charles Butler]

Originally Posted by Brett Topovski

I would be happy to take a look at your website a evaluate it for important internal search engine optimization factors.

I can also analyze how how Google will spider your links.

What is your domain name?

Kind Regards,

Thank you! I'll send a PM your way

Originally Posted by DavidTheMavin

Ok, I see what you're saying about the internal links, but the thing you need to remember is Web tools is not that accurate and is always behind by a week or more. All those stats are there to give you a ROUGH idea of what is going on with your site and how Google views your site, links etc.

Okay, so it will take a little time for them to start showing up then. Thanks for clearing that up

The question I have right now with this is will a sitemap help get all of my paged crawled if I tell Google Webmaster Tools that they are there?