10 replies to this topic

[JakeG]

Hi,

I understand that Pagerank is distributed thoughout a website e.g. the homepage will have the highest value then pages one level down the next and so on.

But what about Pages that are only indexed via a Google sitemap? Say I have a site with a rubbish javascript navigation, or lots of content hidden behind forms and I decided to do a "quick fix" to get the pages indexed using sitemaps, how would Pagerank be assigned to these pages?

[Jill]

But what about Pages that are only indexed via a Google sitemap? Say I have a site with a rubbish javascript navigation, or lots of content hidden behind forms and I decided to do a "quick fix" to get the pages indexed using sitemaps, how would Pagerank be assigned to these pages?

They will have ZERO pagerank since there are no links to them. The sitemap might inform google of their existence, but that's it.

[Michael Martinez]

Hi,

I understand that Pagerank is distributed thoughout a website e.g. the homepage will have the highest value then pages one level down the next and so on.

That is not necessarily true. People generally make it true by pointing most of their links or attracting most of their links toward the root URL.

Technically, ANY page can accrue the highest amount of reported PageRank for a domain.

But what about Pages that are only indexed via a Google sitemap? Say I have a site with a rubbish javascript navigation, or lots of content hidden behind forms and I decided to do a "quick fix" to get the pages indexed using sitemaps, how would Pagerank be assigned to these pages?

PageRank is based mostly on linkage. The Toolbar might extend some probational PR to a page that hasn't been reached through links but basically you want to ensure that all your pages can be found through crawling links.

Edited by Michael Martinez, 10 March 2010 - 06:32 PM.

[qwerty]

Have any of you actually had pages that weren't mentioned/linked to anywhere but a sitemap crawled and indexed (and are you referring to an HTML page containing a sitemap, or an XML sitemap)?

I did a test about five years ago: I published a completely orphaned page and submitted it to the major search engines via their submission forms. Yahoo indexed it briefly, but dropped it eventually. It's still sitting on my server, and isn't cached anywhere. I think I'll try adding it to my XML sitemap and see what happens.

[Michael Martinez]

Have any of you actually had pages that weren't mentioned/linked to anywhere but a sitemap crawled and indexed (and are you referring to an HTML page containing a sitemap, or an XML sitemap)?

I have launched or helped launch several hundred Websites over the past few years that included XML sitemaps in their optimization plans. I took the liberty of testing the XML-only approach for a few larger sites.

They got crawled -- eventually -- but their depth of coverage tended to be less extensive than for sites where substantial external links were put in place. We eventually improved the index coverage for the XML-only sites by building some links for them.

I would not advocate dependence upon an XML sitemap for crawling, but with a large site you may be able to kickstart your search visibility through use of XML sitemaps. You just don't want to let the process end with that first step.

[qwerty]

I assume all of those sites -- even the ones without incoming links -- had logical internal linking structures, right? None of the pages that got indexed were orphaned.

[Michael Martinez]

Correct. There were no (intentionally) orphaned pages on the sites. So far as I know, all the pages that made it into the index had internal links pointing to them.

So, no, I cannot say with 100% certainty that the pages were indexed because of the sitemap submissions.

But I can say with 100% certainty that the slow indexing was consistent across sites that were depending only on sitemap submissions to get into the index.

[Ingenious]

They will have ZERO pagerank since there are no links to them. The sitemap might inform google of their existence, but that's it.

What if I have pages that are linked to (on the homepage, on key pages, in breadcrumbs etc), but are not in the main navigation. Should I use Google sitemaps XML priority to rank my pages that aren't in my main navigation higher than the ones that are?

[Jill]

As long as there are some internal links, they'll get some (real) PageRank.

I don't know this for sure, but I would imagine the priority thing won't really help anything.

[qwerty]

Have any of you actually had pages that weren't mentioned/linked to anywhere but a sitemap crawled and indexed (and are you referring to an HTML page containing a sitemap, or an XML sitemap)?

I did a test about five years ago: I published a completely orphaned page and submitted it to the major search engines via their submission forms. Yahoo indexed it briefly, but dropped it eventually. It's still sitting on my server, and isn't cached anywhere. I think I'll try adding it to my XML sitemap and see what happens.

Just a quick update: it took three days (according to the cache date) for Google to index the otherwise orphaned page after I added it to the XML sitemap. So far, Bing and Yahoo haven't added it.

[Scottie]

Indexed doesn't mean it will actually appear in a search result though, just in case anyone thinks that is a magic formula. It might not even stay in the index without some link to it somewhere. No magic in that...