Question

I think I may have discovered a bug with what may be occurring with the sitemap.xml and the feeds.

I've been playing with the Google Webmaster tools for epicadvice.com for a while now. A few things have always seemed strange:

• Last crawl: 268 Pages Submitted via sitemap.xml, only 2 pages indexed.
• Links to EpicAdvice.com = ~450 at the moment (external links)
• site:epicadvice.com only returns ~30 pages (mostly the tag pages)

With all of this data already in google's index, we still only have 30 pages indexed, and those pages are not even content/question/answer pages, they are "Tag" pages (See for yourself: Google Search of site:epicadvice.com)

So I decided to submit the epicadvice.com/feeds URL from the website as sitemap (Google gives you this option). This is where I believe I stumbled across the major problem. Look at these errors:

URL not allowed
This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location.     
URL: epicadvice.stackexchange.com/questions/1417/tag-name-for-which-stat-should-i-look-for-type-posts
Problem detected on: Oct 13, 2009

URL not allowed
This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location.     
URL: epicadvice.stackexchange.com/questions/1736/what-is-your-favorite-wow-blog-or-resource-site
Problem detected on: Oct 13, 2009

Notice the irregularity here? The feed is reporting epicadvice.stackexchange.com as opposed to EpicAdvice.com! I almost guarantee the reason that google is refusing to index our pages is because the sitemap / feeds are pointing to pages that aren't even in our domain.

Now the question, after all that background...

For those of you having issues with indexing on your site, are your RSS feeds and sitemaps using the correct URL?

(Go ahead and mark this as a CW too if you want, since its more of an open question than direct)

Answer 1

Aaron said that after they created the Primary Domain feature, then they would do an audit of the software to make sure that they only use the primary domain everywhere, but that's not done yet.

Interestingly, this probably helps the early beta users with pagerank because we're still running under both domains (e.g. moms4mom.com and moms4mom.stackexchange.com). Therefore, the sitemap and feed links will both point to a "valid" domain.

We get penalized for running two sites with identical content instead.

Answer 2

Fixed in Beta 4.