Hi, I have a forum which pings google sitemaps daily and at the moment google sitemap tools says ive sumited over 5500 pages... But google says it has only indexed 1900, is there a reason for this? Is there a way to improve the amount of pages indexed, ie. submit less often or do away with the sitemap altogether ??? thanks Kes
Depending on which tool you are using, you ought to be able to setup "URL Filters" for your sitemap to exclude certain URLs. For your forums, try removing URLs from your sitemap that allow users to make or reply to a post. There may be other candidates, but I'm not familiar with your site. I call these 'utility URLs'... they are very useful to actually be on your site (people use these pages), but there is little or no SEO value and they likely have the same content... "enter your post below... yadda yadda"... across hundreds of pages. The other major factor is time. Depending on when you submitted your sitemaps, it may take Google a while to get all of your URLs. In your case, I'd look into the posting URLs and any URLs that use a redirect as part of a login page (a single login page is ok, but forums tend to have a unique login URL for every forum entry and they all say the same thing).
The same thing is happening to one of my sites. And I was wondering why... It's probably them trying something out or not wanting to index it all.