What is the best practice for replacing an old xml sitemap?
-
I have an existing xml sitemap that my website developer loaded, however I don't think its set up properly.
What is the best practice for replacing an old xml sitemap?
Is there anything I should be concerned about?
-
Depending on the size of your site, I would probably break your sitemap up into categories for better monitoring.
- Sitemap.xml (sitemap index of all your sitemaps)
- sitemap-blog.xml
- sitemap-categories.xml
- sitemap-main.xml
- sitemap-videos.xml (if you have any videos you should create a video sitemap, different then a standard sitemap)
When you have them all complete and tested, then submit them to both Google and Bing via Webmaster Tools.
Sitemap Protocol Information: http://www.sitemaps.org
Google's XML Sitemap information: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184
-
You could use a XML sitemap builder like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com, I just tested it and seems to work alright.
Make sure you are truthful about how often you update your website with content. This could be daily, weekly monthly and so on. Second, I would let the sitemap builder determine importance of your pages, it should make your home page the most important.
WARNING: Using the above service will let you work with only 500 pages, if you have more than 500 pages on your website do not use the sitemap it generates.
You can find other services by searching "sitemap generator"
The best way would be to use http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/ but configuration and setup is required.
Good Luck! Hope this helps.
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
-
Best Metrics but Consistently Outranked
I am hoping someone could help us determine why we generally rank quite poorly compared to our competition, despite leading in every single Competitive Metric. We get outranked on a term where the Page Grade gives us an "A", and we best the competitor on each of the metrics. Where would those with more experience suggest we start looking? rank.jpg
Moz Pro | | Yardboy0 -
What's more valuable: new content or optimizing old content
We are a niche legacy print publication that's been around for close to 20 years. Recently, we combined several old sites in one new responsive site. We have over 7,000 articles -many of which are evergreen and can be repurposed when needed. Most of the old pieces although published, have not been optimized for SEO. However, as we create new pieces, we optimize them for search and social and they tend to get more organic traffic. Where we're torn is on how much we should balance our limited editorial resources between cleaning up and optimizing our extensive archive to improve our organic reach, vs. pumping out new original pieces each week. I realize that without a lot of data the answers will be varied - I guess I'm looking for a best practices approach for content publishers. If it helps at all, our main conversion goal is selling subscriptions to our print and digital publications. We know that organic traffic tends to be more engaged than our social referrals. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the magazine fulfilment business, it's tough to know which channels convert better. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | RicardoSalcedo0 -
Can SEOMOZ Pro suggest me the best keyword to work for?
Hi, how SEOMOZ PRO can suggest me the best keyword to rank easily in the first position of Google's SERP? Is there a tool to find good keyword and got some ideas? Regards
Moz Pro | | jadlib0 -
Best way to count number of inbound links to a subfolder?
What's the best way to count and track the number of inbound links to a subfolder like http://www.domain.com/folder ? I've tried using open site explorer but I can't seem to get it to show just inbound links for things under a subfolder. i.e. links to domain.com/folder domain.com/folder/subfolder etc. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | twobitoperation0 -
Best Tool to Build List of Competitor's Top Keywords?
What is the best (hopefully seomoz) tool to create a list of the keywords bringing the most traffic into a competitor's website? Goal is to build a list of keywords that bring the competitor the most traffic, stack ranked by volume of traffic coming into the competitor.
Moz Pro | | sftravel1 -
What's the best & quick tool to spy or analyze backlinks of SINGLE Page?
hey, someone I want to know why this page or blog post of my competition website ranking better.. I've many tools to spy & analyze domain name, but personalty I want to spy just one page of this or that website or blog.. I hope you could help me and share some tools or the best once for this job. thnx again
Moz Pro | | akitmane0 -
Title tag on sitemap.xml
The SEO moz is showing an error on one of the sites within my SE Moz account campaign under Crawl Diagnostics: Title tag missing or empty. No problem here but the file associated with this issue is sitemap.xml and that just dose't look right as as far as I know xml files are title tag free. I've searched around and i've been able only to confirm my initial thought that sitemap.xml dose't use a title tag .. like any other xml. is this an issue ? (the error that is) or i should let it slide. can it be fixed ? if yes, how ? Thanks !
Moz Pro | | eyepaq1
