Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
-
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools.
However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I was confusing those.
To execute the sitemap index, would I just point the crawlers to the index? Do you have any links to overviews of how to set that up?
-
There are also scripts you can purchase for very little cost and have them install it for you on your server and set up a cron job to have your sitemap run automatically each week and ping the search engines to find your sitemap.
One such service is at xml-sitemaps.com - they can install it for you and set up the cron job as well.
Just make sure you are on a good server that can handle the script if your website is large.
-
I think you may be getting xml sitemaps confused with sitemap pages. Your xml sitemap should live at /sitemap.xml as Alan pointed out. The seomoz and other sites that have a /sitemap page is for different purposes. Its not your xml file, its a "topical guide" to your website and all the major sections of your site.
Remember that you can also create a xml sitemap index if you need to have different sitemaps (video, news, content) that houses all the different xml sitemaps underneath it.
-
Typically I use /sitemap.xml
I dont think it matters what you call it, as long as its submitted to Google webmaster tools.
Check out sitemaps.org for more info on how to create a quality sitemap
-
Great, thanks!
Should we also have it live at /sitemap, as SEOmoz does?
-
Yes they will pick it up, you can put the address in your robots.txt file,
http://thatsit.com.au/robots.txt
then you dont need to submit it and all search engines will find it.
Keeep it up todate, free from 404's, 301's all urls should be status code 200, and keep it accurate. Bing for one will igniore it if it is not clean and acurate, they allow only a couple of percent error rate.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can i Get this google meta description?
How can i Get the google meta description that has the website Ke Adventure ? https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=ke+adventure I mean with the link of the website section below the SEO TITLE tx
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
How can I get Google to forget an https version of one page on my site?
Google mysteriously decided to index the broken, https version of one page on my company's site (we have a cert for the site, but this page is not designed to be served over https and the CSS doesn't load). The page already has many incoming links to the http version, and it has a canonical URL with http. I resubmitted it on http with webmaster tools. Is there anything else I could do?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Why did Google stop indexing my site?
Google used to crawl my site every few minutes. Suddenly it stopped and the last week it indexed 3 pages out of thousands. https://www.google.co.il/#q=site:www.yetzira.com&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:w&sa=X&ei=I9aTUfTTCaKN0wX5moCgAw&ved=0CBgQpwUoAw&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=cfac44f10e55f418&biw=1829&bih=938 What could cause this to happen and how can I solve this problem? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Google having trouble accessing my site
Hi google is having problem accessing my site. each day it is bringing up access denied errors and when i have checked what this means i have the following Access denied errors In general, Google discovers content by following links from one page to another. To crawl a page, Googlebot must be able to access it. If you’re seeing unexpected Access Denied errors, it may be for the following reasons: Googlebot couldn’t access a URL on your site because your site requires users to log in to view all or some of your content. (Tip: You can get around this by removing this requirement for user-agent Googlebot.) Your robots.txt file is blocking Google from accessing your whole site or individual URLs or directories. Test that your robots.txt is working as expected. The Test robots.txt tool lets you see exactly how Googlebot will interpret the contents of your robots.txt file. The Google user-agent is Googlebot. (How to verify that a user-agent really is Googlebot.) The Fetch as Google tool helps you understand exactly how your site appears to Googlebot. This can be very useful when troubleshooting problems with your site's content or discoverability in search results. Your server requires users to authenticate using a proxy, or your hosting provider may be blocking Google from accessing your site. Now i have contacted my hosting company who said there is not a problem but said to read the following page http://www.tmdhosting.com/kb/technical-questions/other/robots-txt-file-to-improve-the-way-search-bots-crawl/ i have read it and as far as i can see i have my file set up right which is listed below. they said if i still have problems then i need to contact google. can anyone please give me advice on what to do. the errors are responce code 403 User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/0 -
How can I see the SEO of a URL? I need to know the progress of a specific landing-page of my web. Not a keyword, an url please. Thanks.
I need to know the evolution on SEO of a specific landing-page (an URL) of my web. Not a keyword, a url. Thanks. (Necesito saber si es posible averiguar el progreso de una URL específica en el posicionamiento de Google. Es decir, lo que hace SEOmoz con las palabras clave pero al revés. Yo tengo una url concreta que quiero posicionar en las primeras posiciones de Google pero quiero ver cómo va progresando en función a los cambios que le voy aplicando. Muchas gracias)
Technical SEO | | online_admiral0 -
External Linking & Your sites Link juice
Hey guys, quick question. Does a page lose link juice when it gives link juice? If I link to an outside site, do I lose that same amount of link juice or is it just applied to there site and not removed from mine? I understand that linking to a competitor can in turn help him and hurt me (if he then is seen as more relevant than me to google) but does it have a direct relation to hurting/removing my page link juice? Hope this all makes sense. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Why is Google stripping/replacing my TITLE tag for the site with the BRAND Name only when looking at BRAND level search
When doing a search in Google (US Proxy) - Google is stripping and replacing my functional TITLE with the brand name only (say 'Nike'), but if you do a specific search term like ('buy nike shoes') and see a top 10 listing for my site's homepage, now the title works and shows correctly. I saw this a few years ago with another one of my company domains, but didn't ask the question as it worked out. Thanks for any insight.. NOTE: It's not damaging any results, or rankings for the site.. but: when searching for BRAND name of the company, like I explained, it's replacing a optimized title for the BRAND name, and then re-placing it naturally when deep search brings up the homepage and the TITLE looks fine.. Very weird at best! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0 -
Sitemap.xml problem in Google webmaster
Hi, My sitemap.xml is not submitting correctly in Google Webmaster. There is 697 url submitted but only 56 are in Google index. At the top of webmaster this is what it says ->>> http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml has been resubmitted. But when when I clicked status button RED X occurs. Any suggestions about this, thanks...
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0
