Hey I currently have two sitemaps http://wegotthiscovered.com/sitemap.xml and http://wegotthiscovered.com/sitemap_index.xml Which should I keep and which should I submit to Google. When I submit the index one to Google it says page 2 and 4 are 404, although I can open them just fine. Any help is appreciated.
Typically a sitemap index file just lists other xml sitemaps rather than actual pages. You are limited to 50,000 URLs in a sitemap, so if you have more than that you would create multiple XML sitemaps and list all of them in the sitemap index file so the search engines can find all of them. You would then submit your sitemap index file to Google and they would then find the sitemaps containing actual URLs and crawl them.
Please check if those pages are returning proper server response codes (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTRESP.html) Google Webmaster tools have automated programs, and it would return what you feed it.
search engine need site maps to crawl site page easily . You can add any that content XML site map and use that to your webmaster account
You should submit the first one and wait and let google crawl the links that they are marking as not found... hope it helps...
I should have been clearer in my earlier response. If you only have one sitemap then yes submit the sitemap.xml. If you have more than a single sitemap (for example sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml, etc.) then you would create a sitemap_index.xml file listing all of the different sitemaps and you would submit that. It sounds like in your case you only have a single sitemap, so submit the sitemap.xml.
But if you go to sitemap_index.xml you'll see I have 6 sitemaps, not one. But when I submit that one to Google, it tells me page 2 and page 4 can't be found. I'm confused.
Can you post the URLs of which 2 sitemap files Google is saying they cannot find? Also, if you look in Google Webmaster Central it should say when Google last downloaded your XML sitemap. Has they downloaded it recently?
ye it says http://wegotthiscovered.com/post-sitemap2.xml and http://wegotthiscovered.com/post-sitemap4.xml can not be found
am I naive in thinking it doesn't really matter if you submit a site map at all? I've never sbmitted one and never had any issues with indexing.
I just submitted it again and now it works. So now I have two sitemaps on Webmaster, sitemap.xml and sitemap_index.xml, which one should I keep? Both? or just choose one? which is better?
If you site is not very large and is structured well and if you do not update content often then you may not need one. The search engines may be able to crawl and find all of your content easily which is a good sign. The sitemaps help to make sure the search engines know about all of your pages and to let them know about new pages quicker, since new pages should get added to the sitemap when they are created, so they are hopefully crawled sooner then if found during the natural crawl.
It probably will not hurt you if they are both listed, I have seen large sites with sitemap index and individual sitemap files listed in Webmaster Central with no negative affects. I do see that sitemap.xml is not listed in sitemap_index.xml so I would keep both of them, unless all of the URLs listed in sitemap.xml are also included in the different sitemaps listed in the sitemap_index.xml file. If there is duplication between the different sitemaps then you may be able to remove one of them. It just depends on whether each sitemap includes unique URLs or not, but until you determine if there is duplication or not, I would just leave both of them.
when I go into webmaster, the status keeps switching between clock and check mark, why is it doing this?
Usually the clock means they are still in the process of downloading and verifying it, this is normal activity after resubmitting a sitemap. It might take a little while, but the clock should eventually change to a check mark if there are no errors. Just be patient and the clock will be updated.