We have a static sitemap and a blog...Uh oh!
-
Hi
We have a static sitemap and a blog...Uh oh! We are are just realizing that the 2 are not very compatible!! We need a dynamic sitemap. Is there such a thing as a "set and forget" sitemap that updates itself without us maintaining a database of sitemap data?
Thanks
Andrew
-
You have a very typical case here, Studio33. The usual way to handle multiple sitemaps most efficiently is to create a sitemap index file at the root of the site which would list the locations of the two actual xml sitemaps you have.
Then in both Bing and Google webmaster tools as well as your robots.tx file, you point to the sitemap index file. This way, you're giving the maximum number of signal for where the engines can find your sitemaps. (A sitemap in internal directories may not be found by search engines - they're trained to look for a standard sitemap file in a standard location at the root of your site - no sense making it hard for them!).
Here's Google Webmaster Tools' help doc on making a sitemap index file.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
As long as the pages are linked you need not have them in the site map.
a sitemap is not even necessary for most sites,but the best way to generate is http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2013/02/20/building-sitemaps-manually-stop-until-you-read-this.aspx
Google has something simuar
-
Cheers problem solved!
Thanks
Andrew
-
1: not sure, but it opens ok. but if you submit to WMTs it would warn you if there is a problem
2: to my knowledge, its ok to have more than 1 sitemap (seen a few places have 2 with no issue)
-
http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/page/feature-table.aspx
Google sitemap Yes
so it already generates a sitemap, you just have to find the link
a bit of googling says ther url is www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.axd (but that was a very old refferance might be different now)
-
Hi Paddy,
Your answer prompted me to dig a little further and I have just found that it already has a dynamic one..under /Blog/sitemap.axd.
This raises 2 more questions for me:
1. what is axd, is it ok to use axd not xml.
2. Can a site have 2 sitemaps. I will have 1 in www.example.com/sitemap.xml and 1 in www.example.com//Blog/sitemap.axd. Is that ok? Anything to be aware of with this set up?
Thanks
Andrew
-
-
what cms are you using? most have sitemaps auto generated, or the there is a plugin available.
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
-
New blog on a separate server to the main website?
We have a potential client who operates a jobs board in a niche sector in the UK. They want to start a blog but don't want to set it up on the same server as the main jobs site. Discussion started around Wordpress, and their preference is for the WP.com hosted version in a directory or subdomain of the TLD. Our concerns are around the different locations of the two sites (impact of two diff server locations and IP addresses?) but also the limitation of WP.com to interlink the two sites enough that they provide a decent customer experience. Thoughts, musings, advice - all welcome! Tks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AB-Marketing0 -
Do you outreach to blogs with no recent activity?
I have been doing outreach to blogs with some good success. My question (problem) is that many blogs do not update regularly and they may not have a new post within the past year or so. Is it best to pass on sending them an email or is it worth the time to do it? What is your cutoff point? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimShank0 -
Sitemap Query
I've decided to write my own sitemap because frankly, the automated ones pull all kinds of out of I don't know where. So to get around that, manual it is. But I have some products appear in various categories, should I still list every product in each category in the sitemap, regardless of some being duplicates, or should I choose the most relevant category and list them there? I do have a canonical URL extension which should resolve any duplicate content I have.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Moving popular blog from root to subdomain. Considerations & impact?
I'd like to move the popular company blog from /ecommerce-blog to blog.bigcommerce.com.WordPress application is currently living inside the application that runs the .com and is adding a large amount of files to the parent app, which results in longer deployment times than we'd like. We would use HTTP redirection to handle future requests (e.g. HTTP status code 301). How can this be handled from a WP point of view? What is the impact of SEO, rankings, links, authority? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fullstackmarketing.io0 -
Domain and Sitemap Question
Hi - I am hoping you can help me with this issue we are currently trying to solve. We are hosting our mobile site's content on a different domain than what the URL of the site is, though owned by same company. In Google Webmasters tool we have the mobile sitemap under "sitemaps.xyz.com", however the URL of the site is "m.xyz.com". We have submitted 60MM pages in the mobile sitemap, but only 1MM pages have been indexed. Do you think this set up causes confusion with the bots? Does this affect the crawlability of the site? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ladylana
Eva0 -
Merging blog post tags within static page - Rel = Canonical?
As a blogger, I use a combination of categories and tags in order to organize my content. I do index tags because they've been very powerful for SEO purposes, but there are certain keywords in which I'd like to be able to create an entirely separate static page with the tagged posts merged onto it. So in other words, this is what I'd like the landing page to be: www.website.com/keyword as opposed to www.website.com/tags/keyword Because of this, I'm uncertain what I need to do with that tag page. With this, I would assume that www.website.com/tags/keywords needs to be indexed, but what would be the wise thing to do? Do I place a rel=canonical on www.website.com/tags/keyword to the static page? Do I do a simple re-direct? Do I just leave it indexed? Will it dilute my desired landing page? Would appreciate all comments and thoughts. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | longview0 -
Rewriting dynamic urls to static
We're currently working on an SEO project for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. After a crawl of their site, tons of duplicate content issues came up. We think this is largely down to the use of their brand filtering system, which works like this: By clicking on a brand, the site generates a url with the brand keywords in, for example: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html filtered by the brand Mammut becomes: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html?filter_brand=48 This was done by a previous SEO agency in order to prevent duplicate content. We suspect that this has made the issue worse though, as by removing the dynamic string from the end of the URL, the same content is displayed as the unfiltered page. For example http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html shows the same content as: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html Now, if we're right in thinking that Google is unlikely to the crawl the dynamic filter, this would seem to be the root of the duplicate issue. If this is the case, would rewriting the dynamic URLs to static on the server side be the best fix? It's a Windows Server/asp site. I hope that's clear! It's a pretty tricky issue and it would be good to know your thoughts. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0
