Sitemap Best Practices
-
My question is regarding the URL structure best practices of a sitemap. My website allows search any number of ways, i.e.
1. http://www.website.com/category/subcategory/product
2. http://www.website.com/subcategory/product
3. http://www.website.com/product
However, I am not sure which structure to use in the sitemap (which is being written manually). I know that for SEO purposes the 3rd option is best as the link is more relevant to that individual product, but the Moz tool states that the home page should have less than 100 links (although Google doesn't penalise for having more) and by writing my entire site in the 3rd way it would result in a lot more links adjoining to the home page.
It is either the 2nd or 3rd option, I think, as the 1st category is not keyword specific (rather a generic term, i.e. novelties).
Does anyone have experience with this?
-
Happy to help!
-
Thanks Logan!
-
Google is less concerned about the actual structure of your URLs, and more concerned that you pick a horse and ride it, which you've done by canonicalizing 2 variations to the third. In your example, the third URL is perfectly fine, since it will always remain constant. The other 2 can change depending on how someone navigates to that product. I'd keep it the way you have it.
-
Hello Logan, thanks for responding, although you've not responded to my actual question as such.
Yes, currently I am canonicalising links 1 and 2 toward link 3, but my question wasn't regarding which URL to use in the sitemap, but rather what Googles preferred URL structure was.
Does Google dislike the link 3 structure because it makes it links every product and category directly to the home page? It would appear that the Moz tool seems to think so (although they state that you're not penalised for it).
In your experience, what is Googles preferred URL structure, link 1, 2 or 3? I can easily change the Canonical tag to either of the three, that isn't an issue.
-
Hi,
In your example, you have 3 URLs that render the same content it sounds like. If this is the case, I would assume you're canonicalizing 2 versions to the third. In this situation, you'd want to use the canonical version in your XML sitemaps. You don't want to point search engines to URLs in a XML sitemap then have them go elsewhere when they find the canonical tag.
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 is the best way to increase the DA and PA of website?
Hello, I hope everybody is fine. I am looking for a right way to increase the DA and PA of the website and its webpage. I have a lesco duplicate bill info related webpage which I want to increase the PA. Kindly guys guide me the legit way of increasing the Page Authority. Thanks
Moz Pro | | rankvizguru1 -
Viral Marketing SEO Question: If you build a truly great piece of content, what are the best ways to seed it?
There are a few techniques you can use to spread out and get your content out there.
Moz Pro | | shoobi
1. Email bloggers and tell them about your content
2. Share it on bookmarking sites (like Reddit)
3. Contact influential Twitter and Facebook profiles about it
4. Make it easy for visitors to share your infographic with an embed code at the bottom
5. Share it on infographic websites (like https://www.prizebondtime.com)
6. Share it with your email subscribers (if you have an email subscriber list)
7. Post it on your blog, Facebook page, Twitter, etc. Basically everywhere. The name of the game here is to get your content out in front of as many eyeballs you can as possible. Then after that, it's up to how good your content is to begin the viral loop.0 -
Best blog practices for website
For my Insurance website blog, I use MOZ to help me find high DA authoritative sites, then either generate ideas from them, or rewrite the copy. If I rewrite the copy, I tend to pull from 2 - 3 top authoritative sites. Just so I don't get in trouble, but still offer the most concision information. _My question is, Is this ok to do? _ Secondly, I just read that on some .Gov sites the information is public, and that you can use it as long as you give credit. _My questions is, how do I tell which information is public? _ Thank you in advance 🙂
Moz Pro | | MissThumann0 -
What's my best strategy for Duplicate Content if only www pages are indexed?
The MOZ crawl report for my site shows duplicate content with both www and non-www pages on the site. (Only the www are indexed by Google, however.) Do I still need to use a 301 redirect - even if the non-www are not indexed? Is rel=canonical less preferable, as usual? Facts: the site is built using asp.net the homepage has multiple versions which use 'meta refresh' tags to point to 'default.asp'. most links already point to www Current Strategy: set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools. set the Wordpress blog (which sits in a /blog subdirectory) with rel="canonical" to point to the www version. Ask programmer to add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages. Ask programmer to use 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags & point all homepage versions to www.site.org. Does this strategy make the most sense? (Especially considering the non-indexed but existent non-www pages.) Thanks!!
Moz Pro | | kimmiedawn0 -
Issues with Moz producing 404 Errors from sitemap.xml files recently.
My last campaign crawl produced over 4k 404 errors resulting from Moz not being able to read some of the URLs in our sitemap.xml file. This is the first time we've seen this error and we've been running campaigns for almost 2 months now -- no changes were made to the sitemap.xml file. The file isn't UTF-8 encoded, but rather Content-Type:text/xml; charset=iso-8859-1 (which is what Moveable Type uses). Just wondering if anyone has had a similar issue?
Moz Pro | | BriceSMG0 -
Can anybody recommend me a softwear to create sitemap?
I am trying to increase my website traffic and I know that sitemaps are super important to google and not only. So far I spent some money on softwear from several companies and the results were terrible. Money spent on nothing. I really need sugestions from you because I'm feed up to spend money on nothing. NB: I am not a programer or website developer so my knowlegde is rather basic in this stuff but I like learning new things. THANKS A LOT!!!
Moz Pro | | mihaelastam0 -
Best place to start link building
I am new to SEO and want to start doing some link building using SEO moz to help. I am looking for pointers on where to start. Our business is www.hairbowcenter.com and we sell ribbon and hairbow supplies. We are lacking a lot of good links and I wanted to start focusing getting more. What tools should I use and where do I begin. I noticed our Pagerank is only 1 for our site and I want to get that up as well.
Moz Pro | | tbanwart1 -
SEO PowerSuite - best kept SEO secret or just bullsh..?!?
I've come across a lot of SEO tools in the last 5-6 years. And there are many great tools out there! I don't believe in the one-tool-fits-all. Among the tools I make use of are Raven Tools and Searchmetrics (great audit and market analysis tool!), and the tools in here, of course. In my search for a better ranking report tool I came across Rank Tracker from SEO PowerSuite. That seems like a great tool in category with AWR; but I am not able tell so as I am not a power user. Well, here is where I am going: I then tested the rest of the PowerSuite and it seems as a great product. But searching for the tools in here, and nothing shows up. Silence. Also elsewhere in other serious places. Why is that? It is a collective secret, shhhh, don't tell 🙂. Or is it is just crap? I know they have a bad reputation in regard to prices and updates. What do you guys think?
Moz Pro | | Danni0