One of my e-commerce sites with daily product uploads has sitemap listed has below. Recently we notice that google index rate  has slowed down.   &lt;url&gt; &lt;loc&gt; http://urllink &lt;/loc&gt; &lt;lastmod&gt;2016-07-22&lt;/lastmod&gt; &lt;changefreq&gt;daily&lt;/changefreq&gt; &lt;priority&gt;0.5&lt;/priority&gt; &lt;/url&gt;   Could it be because our automatically generated site map structured, wherein lastmod date is being shown as the previous date every day i.e. it tells google that this product has been changed the previous day when in fact it hasn't been. Does that mean Google will expend resources, try to see what has changed and if it hasn't changed it probably will starting assigning lower priority to our site and hence we run the risk of our more recently added products not being indexed.  We also have a feeling that this lastmod date error is probably eating a lot of our server resources too.   Hope that was clear. Thanks
101240
I've got a sitemap that is generated daily with a lot of links to product pages. These products are imported daily from another data source. Because the update consists of throwing away all current product info and replacing it with the new imported info the last modified date always jumps one day. This is also used in the sitemap. Even for products that haven't changed. All product pages pretend to have been updated.  Will Google penalize the website for pretending the pages have changed from day to day while they haven't?  My solution would be to only change the  entry only if the new imported product data differs from the previous data. I just want to make sure this is a useful upgrade to make, while I could also spend my time on other improvements.
120821
In short:  Should I resubmit my sitemap through Google Webmasters Tools every time I replace a sitemap.xml with an existing sitemap.xml (i.e., www.domain.com/sitemap.xml)? Or does it check it automatically?  Detail explanation:  Once a week, I add  new articles to my website, and each time after uploading new content, I am replacing my existing sitemap.xml with a newly generated sitemap.xml in my website folder.  So, do you think I need to do the same changes (i.e., again submitting the sitemap.xml) to search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, etc...) and in Google Webmaster Tools also?  Yandex Webmaster Tools says this regarding sitemaps:     Please note: there is no need to delete or add another Sitemap file if it has been modified as the Yandex indexing robot regularly checks for changes.
4785
Does Google consider bounce rate or something similar in ranking sites?  Background: here at Stack Exchange we noticed that the latest Google algorithm changes resulted in about a 20% dip in traffic to  (and a much smaller dip in traffic to ). Stack Overflow traffic was not affected.  There was an  which hypothesized that bounce rate might be a ranking signal in Google's latest Panda update.  According to Google Analytics, these are our bounce rates over the last month:  Site           Bounce Rate Avg Time on Site -------------  ----------- ---------------- SuperUser      84.67%      01:16 ServerFault    83.76%      00:53 Stack Overflow 63.63%      04:12   Now, technically, Google has no way to know the bounce rate. If you go to Google, search for something, and click on the first result, Google can't tell the difference between:   a user who turns off their computer a user who goes to a completely different web site a user who spends hours clicking around on the website they landed on   What Google does know is how long it takes the user to come back to Google and do another search. According to the book  (page 47), Google distinguishes between what they call "short clicks" and "long clicks":   A short click is a search where the user quickly comes back to Google and does another search. Google interprets this as a signal that the first search results were unsatisfactory. A long click is a search where the user doesn't search again for a long time.   The book says that Google uses this information internally, to judge the quality of their own algorithms. It also said that short click data in which someone retypes a slight variation of the search is used to fuel the "Did you mean...?" spell checking algorithm.  So, my hypothesis is that Google has recently decided to use long click rates as a signal of a high quality site. Does anyone have any evidence of this? Have you seen any high-bounce-rate sites which lost traffic (or vice-versa)?
121485
Since the Stack Exchange sites run on one clock, and a clock that is not common to most of us (such as those of us in the US), can we display a clock with the site time (UTC) displayed somewhere on every page, such as at the bottom with the other text?  That way we are more aware of when the days turn over, and ecetera...  close votes, delete votes, flags, and normal votes would also benefit from this as well (thanks @Grace Note!)...    What do you guys think? yea or nay? thoughts?
111405
I am using 301 redirects for all URLs.  Should I change sitemap URLs now?  The sitemap currently contains the following URLs:   example.com/cat/1.html example.com/cat/2.html example.com/cat/3.html   Should I change the sitemap's URLs to a new destination?   example.com/cat/year/1.html example.com/cat/year/2.html example.com/cat/year/3.html
58228
This is a question to experienced people that might help us shed some light on the issue.   We noticed a very strange behavior on our site, in Google Analytics. Some dude from Finland, namely, from Kouvola city is hitting one of our pages - only one page on our site, 'bout a hundred times per day, all with an average bounce rate of 90%+...  This is causing our overall bounce rate to go up by 1 to 3% per day... which is very disturbing.. since we're trying to do our best in order to keep it as low as possible. And obviously having it jumped from ~24% to 27%, just because of that crazy dude is not making us happy at all... We tried implementing a geo-targeted script in order to catch this particular visitor and deliver him a juicy message, and it seemed like it helped in the beginning, it has stopped for a day or two, but now he's back...   The geo-targeted script was also logging all IP addresses for page requests originating from Finland in order to find out more details and (in order to block them on the server level, later).. but thing is, it was all mainly cable or DSL connections with various, but not constantly repeating IPs... we are all wondering what is he up to really ?   I think that this page should be kept updated with ideas on how to combat this and perhaps someone could also shed light on what it might be ? What is the reason for doing this "bounce-rate attack", as I call it?  There was a similar question asked on stackoverflow earlier, with no meaningful answer - here -
15871
I'm running into duplicate content warnings on my site. I have product overview pages which can be sorted on price, popularity and more. I end up with URLs like these:  www.example.com/products?sort=popular%20asc www.example.com/products?sort=popular%20desc www.example.com/products?sort=price%20desc www.example.com/products?sort=price%20asc    and with paging I get URLs like:  www.example.com/products?sort=popular%20asc&amp;page=3&amp;rows=10 www.example.com/products?page=6&amp;rows=20    Now, the displayed products are obviously different, but these products can all be accessed via www.example.com/products too and then by paging through them.  Would any of these URL's be considered duplicate content by Google?  And If so, how would I prevent this from being marked as such? I've read about the canonical tag but am not sure if it's applicable here and if so, how it should be applied.
3176
I look today on a few fresh question, and the view count was 0. Even after I refreshed the page a few time. This is definitely a bug, since the question isn't mine.  Also I don't think the all page was cached, since that the DateTime mark was change every reload.  But maybe the SQL result is cached.
86575
My domain : CreditCardPaymentGateways dot in  even after 6 months is not ranking well. Could it be due to length of it?  Also I've blocked backlinks to some directories( without nofollow) using robots.txt.  I suspect either is playing spoilsport in good rankings of my site, which I've optimized well and has least competition.
113780
On the meta home page I noticed the  is listed as doing something, but cannot figure out what it is.  There is nothing on the  or its , but the recent activity is listed with the same timestamp.
85460
For example, in the past, links to www.example.com wouldn't have meant Google would pass any value to say, forum.example.com. What is the current status of this? (Please provide a reference if possible).
32888
For example, I  after using Google to try to find an answer. I then turned back to Google and did a search for  and it was already the first result! Similar searches also put my question on the first page, usually in the top 5!  This is insanity. Did I get lucky and post just before an indexing? Is the popularity of SO leading to Google indexing extremely frequently? Or is Jeff using some kind of crazy SEO?
58751
Opening the menu and selecting an item from the "Favorite Sites" menu allows us to see a feed for a specific site. In the top right corner of this page is a drop-down which allows us to select the "sort order" for the posts. The default is "Active" with other options like "Newest", "Hot", etc.  The problem is that when I select "Newest" or any other option. This preference is not remembered when I change between a different "Favorite Site".  So I am requesting that the selection is persisted when changing between site feeds. I have no preference whether this is implemented per site (to allow a different default for each site) or just one single preferred default that works on all sites (last option selected). I just want it to remember that I have selected "Newest" when I am flicking though the sites.
1013
In my Google Webmaster Tools account, there are warnings about my site.     Some URLs listed in this sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page.   What is the solution?
29745
In Google webmaster tools it shows that I have 309 pages indexed, but when I search using "site:site.com" appear about 180 only (On the first page appears "about 608 results," something near the total number of posts).  I have also noticed that some pages that were indexed before have simply disappeared from Google. In Google webmaster tools there is no error message or anything to indicate any punishment by Google.  According to Google webmaster tools, daily new pages are indexed, but for some reason they are not displayed in the search.  Am I really affected by some punishment by Google or this is some kind of bug?  How can I solve this problem and have all pages indexed normally?
91697
I have myproduct.com which is my master product page.  For UK I also own myproduct.co.uk which is a copy of myproduct.com with some localized content: landing page, promotions, prices, and specific tags.  But there is also duplicate content: myproduct.com/FAQs/ is the same as myproduct.co.uk/FAQs/  I don't want to do a redirect from myproduct.co.uk/FAQs/ to myproduct.com/FAQs/ as I don't want people to leave the localized website.  The myproduct.com/FAQs/ is my "go-to" FAQ page and it's the most likely to be up to date - so I want this page to be indexed my search engines, where as I don't care about myproduct.co.uk/FAQs/ being indexed (unless indexing this page would increase my page rank :) ).  What to do now to be SEO friendly &amp; SEO optimal?   Stop indexing of myproduct.co.uk/FAQs/ via robots.txt? Do some rel="alternate" hreflang="x" configuring on both /FAQs/ page? Something else?
89412
The crawl report shows this: "HTTP ‎(1)‎ In Sitemaps ‎(5)‎ Not found ‎(993)‎ Restricted by robots.txt ‎(487,544)‎"  So the discrepancy between 50,000 and 44,592 isn't coming from that.  Are there any obvious reasons?