Low Sitemap Index Rate

If Google is only indexing a small percentage of the URLs you submit in your sitemap, it signals a serious problem with your site's content quality, technical health, or crawl accessibility. A low sitemap index rate means you're losing potential organic traffic because search engines aren't including your pages in their search results.

What is Low Sitemap Index Rate?

The sitemap index rate is the percentage of URLs submitted in your XML sitemap that Google has successfully indexed and made searchable.

It's calculated using this formula:

Index Rate (%) = (Indexed URLs / Submitted URLs) × 100

For example, if you submit 100 URLs in your sitemap but only 45 are indexed, your index rate is 45%. Zignalify flags this issue when your index rate falls below 50%, indicating that more than half of your submitted pages aren't making it into Google's search index.

This metric lives in Google Search Console under the "Sitemaps" report, where you can see the breakdown of submitted versus indexed URLs. However, unlike GSC which only shows the raw numbers, Zignalify actively monitors this ratio and alerts you when it drops to problematic levels.

The SEO Impact

A low sitemap index rate directly impacts your site's organic search visibility and revenue potential. When Google refuses to index your pages, those URLs cannot rank for any keywords, regardless of how well-optimized the content might be.

Crawlability Issues: If Google can't or won't index your URLs, it suggests fundamental problems with how search engines access your site. This could be due to server errors, blocked resources, redirect chains, or robots.txt misconfiguration.

Content Quality Signals: A low index rate often indicates that Google's algorithms have determined your content doesn't meet quality thresholds. Thin content, duplicate pages, auto-generated text, or low-value pages will be excluded from the index.

User Experience Problems: Pages with poor Core Web Vitals, aggressive interstitials, or mobile usability issues may be crawled but not indexed. Google prioritizes user experience, and problematic pages get deprioritized.

Wasted Crawl Budget: Every URL you submit in your sitemap consumes crawl budget. If Google repeatedly crawls pages it won't index, you're wasting resources that could be used on valuable content. This becomes critical for large sites with thousands of pages competing for limited crawler attention.

According to Google's John Mueller, a healthy site should see index rates above 80-90%. Anything below 50% represents a severe SEO emergency that requires immediate investigation.

Common Causes

CMS Auto-Generation: Many content management systems automatically add every URL to sitemaps, including pagination pages, filter combinations, search result pages, and tag archives. These low-value pages dilute your sitemap and lower your index rate.

Duplicate or Near-Duplicate Content: E-commerce sites often suffer from product variations (size, color) creating separate URLs with nearly identical content. Google will choose one canonical version and ignore the rest, tanking your index rate.

Technical Blocks: Accidentally blocking CSS/JS resources in robots.txt, setting incorrect canonical tags, or having conflicting noindex directives can prevent indexing even when pages are submitted in the sitemap.

Quality Filters: Google's algorithms may determine your content is thin, lacks expertise, or provides little value compared to existing indexed pages. Auto-generated product descriptions, scraped content, or minimal text pages frequently get filtered out.

How Zignalify Detects This

Zignalify connects directly to your Google Search Console account and retrieves sitemap submission data through the official GSC API. Our system aggregates all sitemap data to calculate your site-wide index rate.

The detection logic works as follows:

  1. We fetch all sitemaps submitted for your property
  2. For each sitemap, we extract the "web" content type (the standard HTML pages)
  3. We sum the total submitted URLs and total indexed URLs across all sitemaps
  4. We calculate the index rate percentage
  5. If the rate falls below 50% and you have at least 5 submitted URLs, we flag the issue

Zignalify checks both desktop and mobile indexing separately, since Google maintains different indexes. We also track this metric over time, allowing you to see if the problem is worsening or improving after implementing fixes.

Step-by-Step Fix

Audit Your Sitemap Content

Problem:

<!-- Sitemap with 1000 URLs, many low-value -->
<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/page?sort=price&filter=red</loc>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/search?q=shoes</loc>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/tag/random-tag</loc>
</url>

Solution:

<!-- Clean sitemap with only indexable content -->
<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/products/red-shoes</loc>
  <lastmod>2025-01-15</lastmod>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

WordPress Fix

Install and configure Yoast SEO or Rank Math:

  1. Navigate to SEO → General → Features
  2. Enable "XML Sitemaps"
  3. Go to SEO → Search Appearance
  4. Under "Content Types", set post types you DON'T want indexed (like "Media") to "No"
  5. Under "Taxonomies", exclude low-value taxonomies like tags
  6. Use the "noindex" setting for author archives if you're not a multi-author blog

Shopify Fix

Use SEO Manager or Smart SEO apps:

  1. Go to Apps → SEO Manager → Sitemap Settings
  2. Exclude collections with filters (/collections/shoes?filter=color:red)
  3. Exclude search result pages
  4. Use canonical tags for variant pages to point to the main product
  5. Submit only the cleaned /sitemap.xml to GSC, not individual sitemap fragments

Next.js/React Fix

Generate dynamic sitemaps that exclude low-value pages:

// app/sitemap.ts
import { MetadataRoute } from 'next'

export default async function sitemap(): Promise<MetadataRoute.Sitemap> {
  const products = await getIndexableProducts() // Only products you want indexed

  return [
    {
      url: 'https://example.com',
      lastModified: new Date(),
      changeFrequency: 'daily',
      priority: 1,
    },
    ...products.map((product) => ({
      url: `https://example.com/products/${product.slug}`,
      lastModified: product.updatedAt,
      changeFrequency: 'weekly' as const,
      priority: 0.8,
    })),
  ]
}

After cleaning your sitemap, use Google Search Console's URL Inspection Tool to request re-indexing of important pages. Monitor the index rate over 2-4 weeks to verify improvement.

Best Practices

  • Quality Over Quantity: Only submit URLs that provide unique value and that you genuinely want to rank. A sitemap with 50 high-quality indexed pages beats 500 pages with a 30% index rate.

  • Use Priority and Change Frequency Wisely: Set <priority> values to signal relative importance (1.0 for homepage, 0.8 for key products, 0.5 for blog posts). Update <lastmod> accurately so Google knows when to re-crawl.

  • Implement Canonical Tags Correctly: For product variants or paginated content, use <link rel="canonical"> to consolidate indexing signals to one preferred URL.

  • Monitor Content Quality Metrics: Track average word count, engagement metrics, and topical relevance. Pages with thin content (under 300 words), high bounce rates, or zero backlinks often get filtered from the index.

  • Segment Your Sitemaps: For large sites, create separate sitemaps for different content types (products, blog posts, categories). This makes it easier to diagnose which section has indexing problems.

  • Check Server Performance: Ensure your server responds quickly (under 200ms) and returns proper HTTP status codes. 5xx errors or timeouts during crawling will prevent indexing.

FAQs

Why does Google index some sitemap URLs but not others?

Google evaluates each URL individually based on content quality, technical accessibility, and relevance. Even if a page is submitted in your sitemap, Google may choose not to index it if the content duplicates other pages, violates quality guidelines, or provides minimal user value. The sitemap is a suggestion, not a guarantee of indexing.

How long does it take for Google to index URLs after I fix my sitemap?

Typically 2-6 weeks for meaningful improvement. Google doesn't immediately re-crawl all URLs when you update your sitemap. High-priority pages (homepage, popular products) may get re-indexed within days, while deeper content can take months. Use the URL Inspection Tool in GSC to manually request indexing for critical pages.

Can a low index rate hurt pages that ARE indexed?

Indirectly, yes. If your sitemap is full of low-quality or duplicate pages, Google may interpret your entire site as lower quality, which can impact crawl priority and ranking potential for all pages. A clean sitemap with a high index rate signals to Google that your site maintains quality standards, potentially benefiting all indexed content through improved domain authority.