Why does my sitemap rank high in the SERP's, but not my content pages?

Does anyone know the possible reason why the sitemap of my website often ranks top 10 in yahoo for many of my keywords instead of the pages that actually contain the content relating to the keywords? It is also often the case that both pages rank top ten in yahoo for a particular phrase. E.g. my sitemap in position 2 and my content page in position 5. I previously had the sitemap linked to from every page on my site and I thought that might be the problem, however, since just placing a link to the sitemap from only the homepage two months ago the problem still persists.

What could it be that makes the sitemap, without any external inbound links, seemingly more optimized than pages that are actually optimized using both on and off page factors?

 

Hard to say without seeing the site. give us a link please.

 

Thanks BILZ
I was rather hoping there might just be a simple explanation instead of the need for my site to be analyzed. Let's put it this way; When building/optimizing a site, is there anything you would do to avoid your sitemap showing in the serp's.

Does anyone think that using the tag "noindex,follow" on the sitemap could be a possible solution?

 

I seem to remember seeing something like this happening with a site before. I believe it was due to having text descriptions alongside links on the sitemap. I try to keep text off the sitemap as much as possible and just list the links.

I definitely wouldn't use noindex because you want it indexed, just not ranking so high.

 

Thanks Emory

I'll try removing the descriptions to see if that works.

 

I know a webmaster that has 20K links on his sitemap.

Sounds crazy I know but... G eats it up.

 

That is pretty unique and first time I heard of it, let us know what happens after you remove the descriptions!

 

I'll be sure to, but I guess it will take a few weeks before I can draw any conclusions from it.

 

We use the noindex and follow meta tags on every sitemap for at least 40 websites - with zero problems.

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="FOLLOW, NOINDEX">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">


...follow tells robots to follow the sitemap's links to their destination, noindex tells search engine robots not to index the sitemap. The description tag has nothing to do with listing your sitemap in the SERPs.

 

SEO Tutor©, Thanks for confirming that. I wasn't sure if I should really try it, for fear of getting the whole site deindexed, but I will definitely give it a go now.

 

Does every page on your site link to the sitemap?

I have seen this before where content pages have very few links if any and the sitemap that links to that page ranks higher.

 

You removed the links to your sitemap 2 months ago but google probably hasnt updated the pagerank since then so your sitemap probably still has a high PR.

In the next PR update it should correct the problem.

At least it shows us the power of internal linking!

 

Freespace: it was, but 2 months ago I changed it so that only the home page linked to it.

mistermix: I don't seem to have the same problem in Google, it appears to be limited to Yahoo but I guess pages are weighted by them in the same way that Google does it. However, I think Yahoo have had an update recently and the site did very well with its main keyword, but the problem still remained with my secondary keywords.

I know there is a difference of opinion on this but i think I will try the idea of placing "noindex,follow" in the robots tag. It seems to make sense, and I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks so.

Thanks for your input everyone!

 

God That sounds so damn dangerouse, i would go with removing the descritions first, a site map realy doesnt need all that and it might fix your problem, that was nice to read.