Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
2 sitemaps on my robots.txt?
-
Hi,
I thought that I just could link one sitemap from my site's robots.txt but... I may be wrong.
So, I need to confirm if this kind of implementation is right or wrong:
robots.txt for Magento Community and Enterprise
...
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.es/media/sitemap/es.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.pt/media/sitemap/pt.xmlThanks in advance,
-
We recently changed our protocol to https
We have in our robots.txt our new https sitemap link
Our agency is recommending we add another sitemap in our robots.txt file to our insecure sitemap - while google is reindexing our secure protocol. They recommend this as a way for all SEs to pick up on 301 redirects and swap out unsecured results in the index more efficiently.
Do you agree with this?
I am in the camp that we should have have our https sitemap and google will figure it out and having 2 sitemaps one to our old http and one to our new https in our robots.txt is redundant and may be viewed as duplicate content, not as a positive of helping SEs to see 301s better to reindex secure links.
Whats your thought? Let me know if I need to explain more.
-
Well if both sitemaps are for same site then it's OK. But it's much better to implement hreflang as this is explained here:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en
I'm not sure that Magento can do this but you always can hire 3rd party dev for building plugin/module for this.
-
ok, just one detail: these domains are for a multilang site.
I mean, both have quite the same content: one in spanish and the other un portuguese.
Thanks a lot.
-
You can also have multiple sitemaps on 3rd sites. Look at Moz robots.txt:
Sitemap: https://moz.com/blog-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://moz.com/ugc-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://moz.com/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://d2eeipcrcdle6.cloudfront.net/past-videos.xml
Sitemap: http://app.wistia.com/sitemaps/36357.xmlAlso Google.com robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/culturalinstitute/sitemaps/www_google_com_culturalinstitute/sitemap-index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sitemaps/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/earth/gallery/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/trends/websites/sitemaps/sitemapindex.xml
Sitemap: https://www.google.com/sitemap.xmlAlso Bing.com robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://cn.bing.com/dict/sitemap-index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.bing.com/offers/sitemap.xmlSo using multiple sitemaps it's OK and they can be also hosted on 3rd party server.
-
Hello,
Yes, multiple sitemaps are okay, and sometimes even advised!
You can read Google's official response here."..it's fine for multiple Sitemaps to live in the same directory (as many as you want!)..."
And you can see a case study showing how multiple sitemaps has helped traffic here on Moz.
Hope this helps,
Don
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
-
Robots.txt in subfolders and hreflang issues
A client recently rolled out their UK business to the US. They decided to deploy with 2 WordPress installations: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt
Technical SEO | | lauralou82
US site - https://www.clientname.com/us/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt We've had various issues with /us/ pages being indexed in Google UK, and /uk/ pages being indexed in Google US. They have the following hreflang tags across all pages: We changed the x-default page to .com 2 weeks ago (we've tried both /uk/ and /us/ previously). Search Console says there are no hreflang tags at all. Additionally, we have a robots.txt file on each site which has a link to the corresponding sitemap files, but when viewing the robots.txt tester on Search Console, each property shows the robots.txt file for https://www.clientname.com only, even though when you actually navigate to this URL (https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt) you’ll get redirected to either https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt or https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt depending on your location. Any suggestions how we can remove UK listings from Google US and vice versa?0 -
Should I Focus on Video Schema or a Video Sitemap First
Hey all, I'm working on a website that is soon going to launch a video hub that contains over 500 videos. I'm interested in ensuring that the videos show up on the SERPs page in the highest position possible. I know Google recommends that you have on-page schema for your videos as well as an XML sitemap so they can be indexed for SERP. When I look at schema and the XML video sitemap they seem to communicate very similar kinds of information (Title, Description, Thumbnail, Duration). I'm not sure which one to start with; is it more important to have video schema or a video sitemap? Additionally, if anyone knows of any good video sitemap generators (free is best, but cheap is okay too) then please let me know. Cursory google searching has just churned up a number of tools that look sketchy.
Technical SEO | | perfectsearch710 -
Will an XML sitemap override a robots.txt
I have a client that has a robots.txt file that is blocking an entire subdomain, entirely by accident. Their original solution, not realizing the robots.txt error, was to submit an xml sitemap to get their pages indexed. I did not think this tactic would work, as the robots.txt would take precedent over the xmls sitemap. But it worked... I have no explanation as to how or why. Does anyone have an answer to this? or any experience with a website that has had a clear Disallow: / for months , that somehow has pages in the index?
Technical SEO | | KCBackofen0 -
Should I include tags in sitemap?
Hello All, I was wondering if you should include tags and categories in your sitemap. In the past on previous blogs I have always left tags and categories out. The reason for this is a good friend of mine who has been doing SEO for a long time and inhouse always told me that this would result in duplicate content. I thought that it would be a great idea to get some input from the SEOmoz community as this obviously has a big affect on your blog and the number of pages indexed. Any help would be great. Thanks, Luke Hutchinson.
Technical SEO | | LukeHutchinson1 -
Can you have a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html on the same site?
Thanks in advance for any responses; we really appreciate the expertise of the SEOmoz community! My question: Since the file extensions are different, can a site have both a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html both siting at the root domain? For example, we've already put the html sitemap in place here: https://www.pioneermilitaryloans.com/sitemap Now, we're considering adding an XML sitemap. I know standard practice is to load it at the root (www.example.com/sitemap.xml), but am wondering if this will cause conflicts. I've been unable to find this topic addressed anywhere, or any real-life examples of sites currently doing this. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | PioneerServices0 -
Host sitemaps on S3?
Hey guys, I run a dynamic web service and I will start building static sitemaps for it pretty soon. The fact that my app lives in a multitude of servers doesn't make it easy to distribute frequently updated static files throughout the servers. My idea was to host the files in AWS S3 and point my robots.txt sitemap directive there. I'll use a sitemap index so, every other sitemap will be hosted on S3 as well. I could dynamically mirror the content from the files in S3 through my app, but that would be a little more resource intensive than just serving the static files from a common place. Any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tanlup0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0