Should i remove sitemap from the mainsite at a webshop (footer link) and only submit .XML in Webmaster tools?
-
Case: Webshop with over 2000 products.
I want to make a logical sitemap for Google to follow.
What is best practice at this field?
Should i remove the on-page sitemap there is in html with links (is shown as a footer link called "sitemap") and only have the domain.com/sitemap.xml ?
Links for great articles about making sitemaps are appreciated to.
The system is Magento, if that changes anything.
-
Hi Mickel -
The answer is both. Keep your html sitemap, and keep the link in the footer as is. Crawlers will look at these but they are generally more for human visits.
Then create your xml sitemap (www.url.com/sitemap.xml) and verify it in Google Webmaster Tools.
Hope this helps!
-
You should submit an XML sitemap for the Search Engines and submit it via the Google Webmaster Console and also provide a reference to it from your robots.txt As for the HTML Sitemap, that's more for users. I'd suggest to keep it if it's usable / easy to use by the users.
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
-
What would the Impact of having a sitemap be?
Hi, some more general question here: How important would you rate it to have a sitemap? Would you rate it fundamentally important or just something you can add as bonus? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brainfruit0 -
More bad links
Hi, After a recent disastrous dalliance with a rogue SEO company I disavowed quite a few domains (links he had gained) which I was receiving a penalty of about 23 places. I cleaned up the site and added meta descriptions where missing, and deleted duplicate titles and pages. This gained me another 5 places. In the meantime I have been getting a few links from wedding blogs, adobe forums and other relevant sites so was expecting an upward momentum. Since the high point of bottom of page 1 I have slowly slid back down to near the bottom of page two for my main keywords. Just checked my webmaster tools latest links and another 4 domains have appeared (gained by the dodgy SEO) : domain:erwinskee.blog.co.uk domain:grencholerz.blog.co.uk domain:valeriiees.blog.co.uk domain:gb.bizin.eu They all look bad so I am going to disavow. I expect to find an improvement when I disavow these new domains. As I have said, have started using the open site explorer tool to check my competitors backlinks and getting some low level links(I'm a wedding photographer) like forum comments and blog comments and good directories. I know there is much more than this to SEO and plan on raising my game as time progresses. I have also gained more links from the domains I disavowed on the 8th January mostly from www.friendfeed.com. will webmaster tools ignore any new links from previously disavowed domains? Like I have said I know there are better ways to get links, but are these links (forum comments, blog comments and respectable directories) one way of raising my rankings? To be honest that is all my competitors have got other than some of the top boys might have a photograph or two on another site with a link. No-one has a decent article or review anywhere (which is my next stage of getting links). Thanks! David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Link Removal Request Sent to Google, Bad Pages Gone from Index But Still Appear in Webmaster Tools
| On June 14th the number of indexed pages for our website on Google Webmaster tools increased from 676 to 851 pages. Our ranking and traffic have taken a big hit since then. The increase in indexed pages is linked to a design upgrade of our website. The upgrade was made June 6th. No new URLS were added. A few forms were changed, the sidebar and header were redesigned. Also, Google Tag Manager was added to the site. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer submitted a page removal request to Google via Webmaster tools around June 20th. Now when a Google search is done for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com 851 results display. Would these extra pages cause a drop in ranking? My developer issued a link removal request for these pages around June 20th and the number in the Google search results appeared to drop to 451 for a few days, now it is back up to 851. In Google Webmaster Tools it is still listed as 851 pages. My ranking drop more and more everyday. At the end of displayed Google Search Results for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.comvery strange URSL are displaying like:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/... If we can get rid of these issues should ranking return to what it was before?I suspect this is an issue with sitemaps and Robot text. Are there any firms or coders who specialize in this? My developer has really dropped the ball. Thanks everyone!! Alan |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Question regarding geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools.
I understand that it's possible to target both domains/subdomains and subfolders to different geographical regions in GWT. However, I was wondering about the effect of targeting the domain to a single country, say the UK. Then targeting subfolders to other regions (say the US and France). e.g. www.domain.com -> UK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TranslateMediaLtd
www.domain.com/us -> US
www.domain.com/fr -> France etc Would it be better to leave the main domain without a geographical target but set geo-targeting for the subfolders? Or would it be best to set geo-targeting for both the domain and subfolders.0 -
Total Indexed 1.5M vs 83k submitted by sitemap. What?
We recently took a good look at one of our content site's sitemap and tried to cut out a lot of crap that had gotten in there such as .php, .xml, .htm versions of each page. We also cut out images to put in a separate image sitemap. The sitemap generated 83,000+ URLs for google to crawl (this partially used the Yoast Wordpress plugin to generate) In webmaster tools in the index status section is showing that this site has a total index of 1.5 million. With our sitemap coming back with 83k and google indexing 1.5 million pages, is this a sign of a CMS gone rogue? Is it an indication that we could be pumping out error pages or empty templates, or junk pages that we're cramming into Google's bot? I would love to hear what you guys think. Is this normal? Is this something to be concerned about? Should our total index more closely match our sitemap page count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoninjaz0 -
Using Webmaster Tools to Redirect Domain to Specific Page on Another Domain
Hey Everyone, we redirected an entire domain to a specific URL on another domain (not the homepage). We used a 301 Redirect, but I'm also wondering if I should use the Google Webmaster Tools "Change of Address" section to redirect. There is no option to redirect the old domain to the specific URL on the new domain within the "Change of Address" section. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Should canonical links be included or excluded in a sitemap?
Our company is in the process of updating our sitemap. Should we include or exclude canonical links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Is there a way to keep sitemap.xml files from getting indexed?
Wow, I should know the answer to this question. Sitemap.xml files have to be accessible to the bots for indexing they can't be disallowed in robots.txt and can't block the folder at the server level. So how can you allow the bots to crawl these xml pages but have them not show up in google's index when doing a site: command search, or is that even possible? Hmmm
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0