Google finds the sitemap but I'm unable to view it

[Wayne Luke]

How come the SEE INDEX COVERAGE link is not active?

I have no idea. This is not a link from vBulletin.

About a month ago I have fixed up all URLs, structure, titles, invalid characters, and it seems like everything went down the toilet.

Any major change in the structure of your site is going to cause indexing problems for a short period of time. This is why vBulletin includes an option to redirect all 404 errors to the home page of the site under Settings -> Options -> General Settings.

Even your non-existing site at https://www.granturismo.pl/ should redirect to /forum automatically. Better yet, I would have the forum come up automatically for https://www.granturismo.pl/ and get rid of the /forum/ directory.

I mean for 6 years after the phpbb conversion the forum fell apart and I gave up on it. Now it seems things are even worse. I guess now, it's down to time until everything goes back up in Google? Interestingly we are not getting 50 uniques per day, and during those 5 years of inactivity this number was at 10-20 per day... The webmaster console shows very low numbers (sometimes even 1 click - what the heck???) compared to Google Analytics (shows like 20-30 hits from search engines). I guess those 20-30 are other search engines than Google...

Every page of every topic isn't going to be indexed. They shouldn't be. The first page of the topic is indexed. All other pages in a topic relate back to the first page as their "canonical link." How Google indexes sites changes every six months so what worked years ago with your PHPBB site will not work today. In addition vBulletin's URL structure is different than PHPBB's so there is not a direct correlation. In addition to this, forum traffic has been devalued by Google because it is easy to abuse and they do know exactly what a vBulletin page looks like.

If your goal is to get as many links as possible in Google, then you should just make a lot of short topics, articles, and blog posts to do this. If you're goal is to drive traffic from search engines to your site, the best course of action is to create good content and have third-party sites link to it. Even if you're submitting content that links to your forums on large sites like Medium.com.

Personally, I think the goal should be to drive traffic to your site. So good content should be the key. This traffic ends up enriching your site with comments, new topics, and/or ad impressions.

[PiotrGT1]

Alright, this all makes sense now after I have opened all of these 3 files up. I was about to write you that but you beat me to it.

How come the SEE INDEX COVERAGE link is not active?

About a month ago I have fixed up all URLs, structure, titles, invalid characters, and it seems like everything went down the toilet. I mean for 6 years after the phpbb conversion the forum fell apart and I gave up on it. Now it seems things are even worse. I guess now, it's down to time until everything goes back up in Google? Interestingly we are not getting 50 uniques per day, and during those 5 years of inactivity this number was at 10-20 per day... The webmaster console shows very low numbers (sometimes even 1 click - what the heck???) compared to Google Analytics (shows like 20-30 hits from search engines). I guess those 20-30 are other search engines than Google...

[Wayne Luke]

The sitemap XML is actually a series of files since Google doesn't actually like large files. The URL provided leads to an index of files that Google actually processes. Your last screenshot in post #3 is accurate for a board of your size. You can see all files in the /core/store_sitemap folder on your server. All they provide is a series of links and aren't really meant for people to read.

[PiotrGT1]

I do not see a noindex meta tag within your vBulletin pages. I do not see a robots.txt file in the root of your server.

I got the details of this entry:
Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’
First detected: 02/03/2021Status: Error

Okay, so I guess that's a dated issue then. No need to worry about it.

[PiotrGT1]

Okay, I got everything cleaned up.
Now I only got one sitemap - the correct one in /forum and it opens just like in my previous post - 3 elements and that's it.
When will the huge list of URLs generate? and SEE INDEX COVERAGE link becomes active?

[PiotrGT1]

Okay, I see the problem.
I have two accounts, and one account has one sitemap submitted, and the other, two of them,
The posts which were submited today or before this post were for the www.granturismo.pl, and the issue concerns the second account www.granturismo.pl/forum



Looks like I got a major conflict in Google.... Better clean it up before everything goes down in the rankings.

[PiotrGT1]

Also, the coverage page seems like its updating...

[PiotrGT1]

Regarding robots.txt file - should I upload one?

[PiotrGT1]

This is what I see now:


When I click on the entry:


When I click on the sitemap on top right corner I get to download it and i see this:



So, it seems like things have improved... but how come the URLs are not showing up on my second screenshot?
Does the system need more time or something?

[Wayne Luke]

Your XML sitemap should be located at https://www.granturismo.pl/forum/xmlsitemap.php or [var]https://www.granturismo.pl/forum/core/xmlsitemap.php[/url]. Is one of these this the URL that you submitted?

I do not see a noindex meta tag within your vBulletin pages. I do not see a robots.txt file in the root of your server.

[PiotrGT1]

For some strange reason my sitemap is not showing up:
https://www.granturismo.pl/xmlsitemap.php

However Google's Search Console is sort of picking it up.... But it cannot open the sitemap. Nothing happens when I click OPEN SITEMAP at the top of the page.

It's also strange that no URLs are being picked up at the bottom in the 'sitemaps reads' section.

How can I fix this?





Also, I'm very worried about this:
"Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’"