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Ok, so I have searched through the past year's posts regarding sitemaps, but I never found if it is possible to index too many pages on your sitemap. In my current situation I have been monitoring my top keywords, and search results in the webmaster tools over the past few months, but am not getting the results that I want...

I would like to bring up various keywords such as different car steering racks (which are present all over the 1500 pages on my site), but the majority of keywords are being taken from my installation and general sales policy pages. And this presents a problem because the mass amount of words on these pages may be blocking the importance of words that I want seen...

So, my question is should I only have the pages that I want to be seen like my home page on my sitemap, and remove the other pages (such as installation and GSP pages)?

Thanks

IMO a sitemap won't help a great deal, if it's your policy pages outranking other more useful pages then I advice one of 3 things:

1. nofollow all links to your policy page
2. robots.txt out the page
3. add a robots meta to disallow this page to the search engines

However note that Google could end up liking your policy page more than any other page so it could take a while to build results with your other pages.

Also Google is going through an update or something so results are a bit random at times.

I largely agree.

But I'd add that a better solution to the problem may be to better focus the content of your pages, and be sure your internal navigation options then help visitors to find what they want.

Sitemaps can be useful, and should ideally include every page, but they are in no way a substitute for letting your content do the serious work.

for once i agree with quadrille . This always happens with out of the box e-commerce sites.

The chances are that your content pages (your 1500 pages you mention) are product/category pages? Each one will be near identical, and have little or nothing to distinguish it from any of the other 1500. This is bad for search engines as they want to see good plentiful unique content, not just masses of repeated pages with the odd word change here and there, or with hardly any formatted natural text.

The chances are your pages (or some of them anyway) are in the supplemental index, which means they have been indexed but have been given a very low priority, as quite simply, they're classed as boring or they're all too similar. Most of them will be being treated as a duplicate of another page.

This is probably why your policy page is being indexed... it has some content and some nice paragraphs to look at ! and its different from your other pages.

Give your pages some content, some descriptive paragraphs or two for example.. and make sure each one is as unique as you can make it. Then get some good navigation to your main categories, and see what happens.

Sitemaps (xml) are just guides for the search engines to tell them the pages exist, its has nothing to do with how well they're indexed or returned.

Ok thanks for that information. You are right about 1450 of my 1500 pages being similar pages that display products for sale. However, I never sitemapped those product pages, just all my main pages (home, sales policy, contact.. and so on)

So, what I did do was remove the site maps from the installation and sales policy pages, and I have seen some changes in my webmaster top search queries

I also added more valuable text to the home page and main pages that I want to be ranked higher... So I'll see if that helps.

you've along way to go.. you need to get those category and product pages differed , and indexed.