Google Custom Search can't find anything other than the main page

Question

I added a Google Custom Search to my website several weeks ago, and it has been unable to find anything other than the home page of my site.

I have manually submitted a sitemap to the custom search, and to the webmaster tools (which for some the custom search can't find, but it says I should add one).

I understand there are not a lot of details here, but I don't have much to go on. I've double checked my robots.txt, there's nothing there that's preventing the indexing of my pages.

EDIT: Actually, does the google custom search work any differently than a regular google search? I assumed that it indexed separate from the regular google search, but I guess it's possible that both a google custom search and the normal google search draw from the same pool of pages. In that case the only way to get custom search to find my pages is to get Google to crawl them...which pretty much makes the custom search useless if it can't find the most recent things I've posted.

Answer 1

Make sure that you are the verified owner of your site on http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and that there is a site map uploaded there as well.

On the Custom Search control panel go under indexing and make sure that your sitemap is linked there and then click index now.

Looking at your sitemap.xml you don't specify a schema definition. Google may be looking for this to ensure that your xml is formatted correctly. You specify the schema by modifying your <urlset> tag in the following way:

<urlset xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">

Google custom searches do not add to the Main Google index and the main index doesn't apply to the custom search. They both crawl the site though, and the more changes to the site the more frequently they crawl for new content. I can't guarantee that any of this will fix the indexing issues but it can't hurt.