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We have developed a website, which works somewhat like a wiki - but not entirely.

User of the website can submit and update information about their villages to the website and categorize it under Province, District and Divisional Secretariat.

Currently the site has 14,000+ villages listed.

A XML sitemap is generated dynamically that contains all these 14,000+ villages' pages and other static pages of the website. The sitemap is submitted to Google through Google Webmaster Tools. However, Webmaster Tools states that only 119 is indexed out of the 14,000+ items in the sitemap.

As a result of this - I suspect - some of the villages can be searched through Google, while others can't.

How would I get all of them included in Google?

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How would I get all of them included in Google?

The short version is that you have no real say in the matter. Assuming the site isn't spam, you've basically done what's required of you to inform Google of your pages and site structure, but "Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs".

If the site is new, it's possible that it's just not considered "interesting" or worthwhile enough yet and that the amount of indexing will increase over time on its own as the site gains attention and links. Focus on promoting it for a little while.

If you think there's something really wrong on Google's end, you might try issuing a reconsideration request to see if that gets you any result.

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  • Hi and thanks Su' for the answer. The site is not spam and has genuine content submitted by real users. I can post the link to the site here if it is not considered spamming this service. There site has been around for a while, although I submitted the massive sitemap recently. Before that, there was a small sitemap that contained links to just static pages. – budhajeewa May 3 '12 at 4:00
  • Other than possibly revealing something bad about the sitemap itself(you don't really need us for that), your URL isn't likely to provide much more information. Again, there's simply no promise your site will be indexed at all. It seems you've jumped through the proper hoops. If there are any obvious problems, Webmaster Tools should be telling you about them. Now you should focus on promoting and improving the site. – Su' May 3 '12 at 8:04
  • @bud actually IMO it is worth posting your URL as we can often rule out some obvious solutions that you may or may not be aware of (misconfogured robots.txt or meta tags or lack of internal links). – DisgruntledGoat May 4 '12 at 1:38
  • @DisgruntledGoat: Here it is: srilankavillages.com – budhajeewa May 8 '12 at 10:31
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After looking at the URL you provided it's clear that the site is very low quality. Thousands of URLs in your sitemap are simply "browse" pages, with only lists of links.

The "village" pages themselves are all very similar. I picked 2 at random here and here and they are identical apart from 5 words. So Google is probably not bothering to index all your pages because they are all so similar.

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I always advise against relying on sitemaps for indexing, at least until you are confident you are reaching your indexing goals (this way it's easier to identify problems). A site like this is going to be a challenge to get indexed fully because there is not a lot of unique content and not a lot of links. If I were you would start by taking a deep dive into the site architecture, make sure each individual page is linked to from what will become a "hub" on your site (it can be a hub based on region, or based on any common thread you think will be useful to users). Then once the site is organized properly work on building in depth content for the hub sections, this should be information that will further the purpose of the site and be really useful. Once you have great content to the hubs start building links to those pages (perhaps local tourism offices, or government services, and organizations in those regions, schools, local business ect. links from anyone who has a vested interest in making sure they are visible online) Once these hubs start getting links and traffic the pages that directly linked to them will have a much better chance of getting indexed.

Additionally for the individual village pages the more unique content you can get on them the better, perhaps use some marketing budget to create incentives for adding "places of interest" or completing profiles etc. Or take advantage of Amazon's Mturk to fill in some of the missing info on the profiles.

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