Recently in the Google SEO office hours stream, someone asked Google’s John Mueller on “how someone can support Google to recognise which web pages of a website it actually needs Google to index on SERP because Google’s crawler was only indexing 10% or so of their site’s pages in the XML Sitemap”.
Mueller’s response to this query:
“To give an understanding of the importance to your site, you require to do more work on internal linking.
To make it simple, XML Sitemap is only for Google to understand when we crawl your website which of the pages you care about the most.
Usually, that is where you would begin with the home page depending on the site, but in several circumstances, we begin with the home page only.
And the web pages that are internally connected from the home page crawler will see them as being more valuable than web pages which are just 5 or 6 steps away from the home page.”
So what we learn from this conversation is that first, we need to identify our topmost money-making pages. Then focus on internal links that connect important pages to our home page, which will help Google understand which web pages really need to get indexed.
Here is the link to the video where the webmaster explained at the 5:55 mark:
