Sitemap Question
-
Hello,
I have a website and my sitemap (generated by the Yoast plugin) is set up into three different sections. One thing I noticed was that my homepage isn't in my sitemap.
Is this an issue? The homepage is indexed, but does it need to be added to the sitemap in order for it to be crawled?
How would I go about adding the homepage to the sitemap?
-
I don't think it's a big deal not to have it, but for something that can be done in literally 10 seconds I'd play safe than sorry.
To explain what I meant about the duplicate home pages, you can often have multiple versions accessible to the public. For example:
I haven't looked at how you have it set up, but all should go only to one version to prevent home page duplication, and the final version you decide on would be the one you include in the sitemap. Hope that helps!
-
Hi Brandon,
No, it shouldn't be an issue at all. I have it like that for a lot of the sites I run so it's not a big deal
If you feel uncomfortable with it, switch over to a separate plugin and deactivate the yoast one. I know a lot of people that do so (usually because they are comfortable using /sitemap.xml LOL)
-
Look in your site map file, and copy and paste one of the other url snippets. Change out the url for the url of your homepage. Make sure to double check the urls that were included, for any unusual urls. With cms-based sites, site map plug-ins can include non-sef urls, that you don't want indexed.
I usually make my sitemaps manually. You should include plenty of info, including creation date, last modified date, etc. If you need a template or would like me to send you a sample site map with the correct structure, let me know.
And to answer your question, yes, I would include the home page url. While you are at it, make sure your site cannot be accessed with www and no www.it should always go to one or the other. Same goes with index.php for the homepage.
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
-
Our sitemap is not indexed i Google even though it's successfully processed
Hi, Ours is a WP hosted website. We have submitted the XML sitemap with a WP plugin. It's been successfully processed by Google but it's not been indexed in and can't be found in SERP. How to get this indexed? Will there be any low crawling of sitemap as it's not indexed? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Domain Migration Question
Lets say there is a brand that has one primary product type at different optional tiers. (Think something like SMB/Enterprise/Individual) Lets also say that 1 year ago this brand migrated from having everything under 1 domain (Domain A) to moving 2 of their product tiers to another domain (Domain B), a new domain. They have done some initial SEO work on this domain and had a pretty successful migration but it has also been decided that they are going to no longer offer one of these product tiers and they intend to eventually migrate everything back under the 1 domain (Domain A) They just are not sure whether they should do this now or later.
Algorithm Updates | | DRSearchEngOpt
During this next year or so there is also going to be some likely re-branding/design, etc...stemming from this decision, on the domain, meaning content changes and all that fun that goes into a migration/re-design/re-branding strategy. The timing of this has not been fully decided on. Here is the question: Should they a) Migrate back to Domain A first and then do the re-design or b) Keep 2 separate domains for now, figure out the re-design/re-branding, make content changes and then migrate Site A over in a year or so after all changes have been made? My concern with option a) is that they migrated a little less than 1 year ago and will be migrating back which I feel could have a negative impact on the content and the domain. The positive side I see here is that this impact could be just as large even if we waited so doing this now might be a better, more efficient use of our time if we can migrate and make content changes fairly close together or concurrently.
My concern with option b) is that the tier they no longer offer makes up the majority of that sites business and traffic, leaving us with not much in terms of content that ranks well and garners much traffic. Trying to optimize for the remaining product tier by itself on it's own domain could be quite hard and then having to migrate it in a year or so back to Domain A could negatively impact any small organic impact I can make on applicable pages/domain. Does anybody have any input here? I am leaning towards Option A and but wanted to get some other opinions. Thanks Everybody! Edit: So far, this has received a lot of views but no input. I am hoping to have a bit of a dialog on this so any ideas or input is welcome.0 -
Question About : Redirecting Old Pages to New & More Relevant Ones
I'm looking over a friends website, which used to have great natural ranking for some big keywords. Those ranking & CTR's have dropped a lot, so the next thing I checked into was top selling Brand & Category pages. Its seems like every year or so a New Page was constructed for each brand... Many of which have high quality and natural inbound links. However, the pages no longer have products and simply look outdated. I'm trying to figure out if they should place redirects on all the old pages to a new URL which is more seo friendly. Example Links : http://www.xyz.com/nike2004.html , http://www.xyz.com/nike-spring2006.html , http://www.xyz.com/2011-nike-shoes.html - (have quality inbound links, bad content) .... Basically would it be advantageous to place redirects on all of these example pages to a new one that will be more permanent... http://www.xyz.com/nike-shoes.html I'm also looking at about 15 brands and maybe 100+ old/outdated urls, so I wasn't sure if I should do this & to what extent. Considering many of the brand pages do rank, but not as well as they should... Any input would help, thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
International foreign language SEO questions
I'm looking to add some foreign language pages to a website and have a lot of international SEO questions. I think the overall question is can you do SEO yourself if you are a native English speaker for a language you don't speak (like Chinese)? 1. How do you go about doing keyword research for a foreign language? What tools are available? 2. How do you know what search engines you should optimize for in a different country? And where can you find the technical SEO requirements for each? I'm wondering things like title tag length for Baidu. Or is the Title length different for Yahoo Japan vs. US? Do you write titles and meta tags in Chinese/Japanese for respective countries? Etc.
Algorithm Updates | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Algorithm Question
Hello, I'm trying to figure out why my site and a competitors site literally trade places in the SERPS every week? My site has a boatload of content with an active blog with a lot of links versus a competitor that has virtually no links, limited content, 404 errors on the site. The links I have are all natural links with the exception of directories like JoeAnt. The only thing their site has is Domain Age where as mines is 4 months old. Any insight?
Algorithm Updates | | bronxpad0 -
Big site SEO: To maintain html sitemaps, or scrap them in the era of xml?
We have dynamically updated xml sitemaps which we feed to Google et al. Our xml sitemap is updated constantly, and takes minimal hands on management to maintain. However we still have an html version (which we link to from our homepage), a legacy from back in the pre-xml days. As this html version is static we're finding it contains a lot of broken links and is not of much use to anyone. So my question is this - does Google (or any other search engine) still need both, or are xml sitemaps enough?
Algorithm Updates | | linklater0 -
Yet another Panda question
Hi Guys, I'm just looking for confirmation on something..... In the wake of Panda 2.2 one of my pages has plummeted in the rankings whilst other similar pages have seen healthy improvements. Am I correct in thinking that Panda effects individual pages and doesn't tar an entire site with the same brush? Really I'm trying to see if Panda is the reason in the drop on one page or whether it could be something else. The page in question has dropped 130 positions - not just a general fluctuation. Thanks in advance for your responses!!!
Algorithm Updates | | A_Q0
