why would a sitemap listing show up before actual page in SERPS

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paul

Ninja
One of my sites that I managed had some sitemap problems, it was displaying the text rather than then links to the pages. And now it appears that for one of the keywords that my client was targetting it lists the sitemap and not the actual page. Any idea why google would link to the sitemap before the relevant page ?

in my robots.txt I have the sitemap listed as
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.ie/sitemap.xml.gz

but is is showing up for the non zipped version
http://www.mysite.ie/sitemap.xml
 

RedCardinal

New Member
God knows. And without you giving us the search query there's little chance of us figuring it out... could be one of a million things.
 

paul

Ninja
It now appears fixed, I resubmitted the sitemap to Google because previously the sitemap was messed up with a bad reference to the .xsl file.
 

RedCardinal

New Member
I'd say it was purely because you were serving the sitemap file as plain text (cached version showed actual content), combined with the fact that this was a low comp term - the sitemap probably ranked somewhere in the top 10 results for that term due to proximity of the search query terms, and got grouped together with your first result.

Wouldn't surprise me if this page starts to rank for that term shortly also...
 

paul

Ninja
any suggestion on how many URLs should be in a sitemap ? I've submitted some with 10k URLs and google doesn't complain. This is the .xml version of the sitemap (not .xml.gz)
 
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