Google Sitemap, What's Up?

So i created an xml sitemap and submitted it to Google, they gave it the 'ok' and then just yesterday indexed my site.

I'm not 100% sure they used the sitemap when they did their crawl but I assume so.

The weird thing is, out of 500 URLS submitted on the sitemap, on which about 10 of the URL's were given priority ratings of 1 (the highest) while the rest were left at .5 (the default) only 5 URL's from my site were indexed, and none of those URL's were the ones with the higher priority rating.

Actually, other then the main url, mywebsite.com, the other url's taht were indexed were ones with very little content, so I'm wondering why would Google index pages of my site that were not labeled as having high priority, and had less content than many other pages. It just seems so random.

Maybe by tomorrow more of my URL's will be indexed, maybe the others just aren't showing up today?

Anyone with experience with sitemaps and getting indexed who has an idea?

Thanks.

are you using friendly urls?

I just looked up friendly URL's, and it sounds like that means the url doesn't have any odd characters like ?, #, = , etc. None of my url's have those.

The urls that were indexed have the same exact format of all the urls that didnt.

Google uses the xml sitemap in addition to its normal crawl patterns. Just because you've indicated that some of your pages are important, it's no guarantee that Google agrees with you.

Are these 'important' pages all linked from the homepage? Do they have more internal links to them than any of the other pages?

Google isn't going to leap in and index all your pages in one go -- it's a brand new site, with 0 trust established and as yet, unlikely to have any external backlinks detected by Googlebot. It's going to take time to see your pages get indexed as Google keeps a close eye on your site to establish the nature of it, it's update patterns, etc, etc.

Thanks for the reply. Each page of my site has about the same number of internal links as every other page, it's a commercial site, with a sidebar and footer that have the exact same links on every page. And I do have a couple external links to the site. The question was not why aren't all my pages indexed, it was why would Google index 5 pages out of 500 that have next to no content, and not index the others that do have content and were given higher priority in the sitemap. The 5 pages that were indexed literally have no content, just a sidebar and footer, they are under construction, but they got indexed. Obviously now I'll quickly add content to those...but just weird that google would pick those 5 pages, instead of others.

steve,
as far as freindly url, that is exactly what i meant....basically you want your urls not to have querystrings and all that special character stuff as much as possible. also it helps to have your directories relevant to content of the page..for example if you are selling GPS systems, for product pages instead of saying "Ourproducts" you want to say "GPS-Products" or even "GPSProducts" if you are not comfortable with hyphens.

also I agree with JagNet, google sitemap is not here to guarantee all of your pages are going to be indexed...what you need is more internal linking from your sites. And give it sometime Google will revisit your site again. Besides your navigation, make sure your contents also link to your other pages.

Also what you need to do is to constantly make modification to your site, so every time google robot visits your site, it sees a new item so it knows your site is being constantly updated and will revisit your site more often..(this is an insider google tip from a friend who worked on this project ;) )

and last item, make sure your robot.txt indicates that google can visit all your sites. google sometimes doesnt visit a certain pages until you tell it to...secure pages are one of them.



ok i hope it all helps