301's - Do we keep the old sitemap to assist google with this ?

[PeteC12]

Hello Mozzers,

We have restructured our site and have done many 301 redirects to our new url structure.

I have seen one of my competitors have done similar but they have kept the old sitemap to assist google I guess with their 301's as well.

At present we only have our new site map active but am I missing a trick by not have the old one there as well to assist google with 301's.

thanks

Pete

[PeteC12]

Awesome , Many thanks All !!.

Much Appreciated

Pete

[CleverPhD]

Thanks Donna!

[DonnaDuncan]

To reinforce what Dirk has stated, I'm sharing a similar question that was asked a month ago - "Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?" The question was answered by CleverPhD. I like how he talks about how Google interprets the change, impacts you might see in Google's Search Console, and what to do about it.

It's worth the read.

[DirkC]

You shouldn't keep the old sitemap. If the pages are in the index - Google will figure it out the next time when the bot is visiting the site. Make sure that you update all the internal links (avoid internal redirects) - Screaming Frog will do miracles here.

If you would keep the old one you will get warnings like this:

"When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL."

rgds,

Dirk