How important are sitemap errors?
-
If there aren't any crawling / indexing issues with your site, how important do thing sitemap errors are? Do you work to always fix all errors?
I know here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds
Duane Forrester mentions that sites with many 302's 301's will be punished--does any one know Googe's take on this?
-
Very important. Particularly if you have a large site. We operate a large site with 100,000's of pages and as Dan said it can be difficult to maintain. We use something called Unlimited XML Sitemap Generator which builds XML sitemaps for us automatically. I'd highly recommend it although it takes a bit of fiddling with to get it up and running as it's software which sits on site. We couldn't manage without it as we'd be forever on sitemaps.
We found that getting sitemaps right on a large site made a huge difference to the crawl rate that we encountered in GWT and a huge indexation to follow.
In particular check for 302's. I made the mistake of leaving those for a while and am sure that we suffered from some loss of link equity along the way.
Hope it helps
Dawn
-
Your sitemap should only list pages that actually exist.
If you delete some pages, then you need to rebuild the sitemap.
Ditto if you delete them and redirect.
Google is always lagging, so if you delete 10 pages and then update the sitemap, even if google downloads the sitemap immediately, they will still be running crawls on the old map, and they may be crawling the now-missing pages, but haven't shown the failures in your WMT yet.
If you update your sitemap quickly, it is possible they will never crawl the missing pages and get a 404 or 301.
(but of course, there could be other sites pointing to the now-missing pages, and the 404s will show up elsewhere as missing)
I am always checking, adding, deleting and redirecting pages, and I update the current sitemap every hour and all the others are rebuilt at midnight every night. I usually do deletions just before midnight if I can, to minimize the time the sitemap is out of sync.
-
As far as I know Google is more lenient with sitemap errors, but I would still recommend looking into it. The first step would be to be sure your sitemap is up to date to begin with - and has all the URLs you want (and not any you don't want). The main thing is none of them should 404 and then beyond that, yes, they should return 200's.
Unless you're dealing with a gigantic site which might be hard to maintain, in theory there shouldn't be errors in sitemaps if you have the correct URLs in there.
Even better, if you're running WordPress the Yoast SEO plugin will generate an XML sitemap for you and it update automatically.
Hope that helps!
-Dan
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
-
Setting Up Hreflang and not getting return tag errors
I've set up a dummy domain (Not SEO'd I know) in order to get some input on if I'm doing this correctly. Here's my option on the set up and https://technicalseo.com/seo-tools/hreflang/ is saying it's all good. I'm self-referencing, there's a canonical, and there is return tags. https://topskiphire.com - US & International English Speaking Version https://topskiphire.com/au/ - English language in Australia The Australian version is on a subdirectory. We want it this way so we get full value of our domain and so we can expand into other countries eventually e.g. UK. Q1. Should I be self-referencing or should I have only a canonical for US site? Q2. Should I be using x-default if we're only in the English language? Q3. We previously failed when we had errors come back saying 'return tags not found' on a separate site even though the tags were on both sites. Was this because our previous site was only new and Google didn't rank it as often as our main domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cian_murphy0 -
Getting into Google News, URL's & Sitemaps
Hello, I know that one of the 'technical requirements' to get into google news is that the URL's have unique numbers at the end, BUT, that requirement can be circumvented if you have a Google News Sitemap. I've purchased the Yoast Google News Sitemap (https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/news-seo/) BUT just found out that you cannot submit a google news Sitemap until you are accepted into google news. Thus, my question is that do you need to add the digits to the URL's temporarily until you get in and can submit a google news sitemap, OR, is it ok to apply without them and take care of the sitemap after you get in. If anyone has any other tips about getting into Google News that would be great! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stacksnew0 -
Importance of having a tightly themed sight and domain for ranking and SEO
I started the site 10 years ago as www.islesurfboards.com selling mainly surfboards and ranking mainly for surfboards, paddle boards came along and now paddle boards make up for 95% of all the business and we are missing alot of ranking in the paddle board related keywords so what is the best course of action? my plans: keep www.islesurfboards.com and keep it surfboards focused, create a new domain www.islepaddleboards.com and move all paddle board related content products etc over to this domain with redirects to transfer the link juice. Doing this will still keep my surfboard site and all its long term domain credibility and i can offer a link over the the www.islepaddleboards.com site for people looking to buy paddle boards and vice versa on the new paddle board site for people looking to shop surfboards. Would this be the best course of action or does can anyone offer any better suggestions. I know google supposodly has taken off much ranking emphasis of the domain but as i pick apart the competition who rank welll in the paddle board space they all have "paddleboards" in the domains and a paddle board specific site to keep it tightly themed which pays off across the board in content, ppc campaigns, and overall ease of use as surfboards and paddle boards are two seperate products and paddle boards is very hot right now so i dont want to stay commited to www.islesurfboards.com domain if its going to create confusion or not help me rank well for paddle boards leading into the future. Any ideas? Thoughts on the best route to take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Do image sitemaps provide value for non e-commerce sites?
Is it worth putting together an image sitemap to submit to Google if you're not an e-commerce site? Also, if you're using a CDN like Amazon Web Services (cloudfront), can you even submit an image sitemap? According to Google you need to verify your CDN in webmaster tools if you're going to do so. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kking41201 -
302 redirects in the sitemap?
My website uses a prefix at the end to instruct the back-end about visitor details. The setup is similar to this site - http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf with a 302 redirect from the normal link to the one with additional info and a canonical tag on the actual URL without the extra info ((the normal one here being http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com,) However, when I used www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a sitemap they did so using the URLs with the extra info on the links... what should I do to create a sitemap using the normal URLs (which are the ones I want to be promoting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
How Important is Domain Authority in Back-Link Audit
First off I just want to say thanks Penguin! Now I get to start the joyous experience doing a back-link audit, and removing all the negative links. Also I now have to be on constant alert for Black SEO tactics targeted at my domain due to the cut throat business I am in. I think it can only be a matter of time before Google says all backlinks do not matter. Unfortunately, I need rank now!! So I have a couple of questions: First how important is domain rank in a back-link audit? Should I remove myself from indexes with low domain rank, and leave ones with high? Should I remove myself from as many indexes as possible? What about obvious paid blog posts that have high domain rank? Do you leave those? What is considered a low Domain Rank for back-links, under 35 - 40? Second, what is a good success rate for a back link audit. How can you measure improvement, other than waiting for your PR or SERP to go up? Third, in some situations it looks like back-links are legitimate, but they all point to my home page. Is it worth pursuing for example asking these people to link to the specific product they are referring to for example children picnic tables instead of just our home page? And, lastly what legal rights do I have to get back-links removed? Is it only on sites that copy my content that I have copy written? Is it possible to prevent Google from counting these back-links through an .htaccess file? Thanks in advance for all of the help. I hope to take what I learn and put it into a guide of some capacity as I am sure many people are going through this same situation at the moment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fifthroommarkets0 -
Fixing Duplicate Content Errors
SEOMOZ Pro is showing some duplicate content errors and wondered the best way to fix them other than re-writing the content. Should I just remove the pages found or should I set up permanent re-directs through to the home page in case there is any link value or visitors on these duplicate pages? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
How long until Sitemap pages index
I recently submitted an XML sitemap on Webmaster tools: http://www.uncommongoods.com/sitemap.xml Once Webmaster tools downloads it, how long do you typically have to wait until the pages index ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0