I started my wildlife photography website (www.stevenbrumby.com) in 2018 and since the site relies heavily on Javascript to display content I was aware from the outset that a sitemap would be crucially important. Initially the sitemap included more than 1000 urls but since then I have periodically updated the sitemap and it now includes 1338 urls. The sitemap status has been "success" all along. I've also checked with other sitemap validators and no errors were found. In Search Console I have 43 valid pages all with the status "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap". But these pages are actually in the sitemap (I have not checked all 43, but the ones I checked were all there.) This is the first thing I don't understand! There are 1.26K excluded pages of which the majority (1232) have the status "Crawled - currently not indexed". Maybe I am impatient, but I would have thought that by now some of these pages should have been indexed. I would welcome any advice on where I am going wrong and how I might improve things.
2 Answers
After much trial and error I have found the answer to my question. Most of the urls in my sitemap had four query parameters. When I reduced this to one query parameter, immediately Google started indexing my site. 4 weeks after the change, 88% of the urls in my sitemap have been indexed. I expect this percentage to increase further in the weeks ahead.
sometimes it takes 2-3 days or maybe a couple of weeks before the newly added urls are been index, specially if there's a lot of pages involved.
Good day! :)
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