What should my main sitemap URL be?
-
Hi Mozzers - regarding the URL of a website's main website:
http://example.com/sitemap.xml is the normal way of doing it but would it matter if I varied this to:
http://example.com/mainsitemapxml.xml or similar?
I can't imagine it would matter but I have never moved away from the former before - and one of my clients doesn't want to format the URL in that way.
What the client is doing is actually quite interesting - they have the main sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml - that redirects to the sitemap file which is http://example.com/sitemap (with no xml extension) - might that redirect and missing xml extension the redirected to sitemap cause an issue? Never come across such a setup before.
Thanks in advance for your feedback - Luke
-
Yes there is no problem with that, in fact redirect to a list of sitemaps, you can make the test
-
Thanks for your help Ramon!
-
Thanks Roman - that is helpful - with Yoast - do they redirect from one sitemap to another sitemap? Is that acceptable to Google (the redirect from one sitemap URL to another sitemap URL?).
-
Is not so weird, Yoast SEO generate multiples sitemaps based on pages, categories or even images and use the same structure, redirect from sitemap.xml to another url
Talking about the format
The Sitemap protocol enables you to provide details about your pages to search engines However, in addition to the XML protocol, there's anothers format supported such as RSS feeds and text files, which provide more limited information.So there are many option to create a sitemap but the most common and accepted is XML
Source > Sitemap.org
-
hi Luke Rowlands,
You can use another name (although i can´t come up with a reason why a client wouldn´t want that format in the url). You should however than
Link to it in your robots.txt or submit the sitemap directly to the search engines
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
-
Can I add external links to my sitemap?
Hi, I'm integrating with a service that adds 3rd-party images/videos (owned by them, hosted on their server) to my site. For instance, the service might have tons of pictures/videos of cars; and then when I integrate, I can show my users these pictures/videos about cars I might be selling. But I'm wondering how to build out the sitemap--I would like to include reference to these images/videos, so Google knows I'm using lots of multimedia. How's the most white-hat way to do that? Can I add external links to my sitemap pointing to these images/videos hosted on a different server, or is that frowned upon? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOdub0 -
Add versioning to an xml sitemap?
Is there a way to add versioning to an xml sitemap? Something like <version>x.x</version> outside of the <urlset>?</urlset> I've looked at a bunch of sitemaps for various sites and don't see anyone adding versioning information, but it seems like it would be a common issue - I can't believe someone hasn't come up with some way to do it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATT_SEO0 -
WordPress Duplicate URLs?
On my site, there are two different category bases leading to the exact same page. My developer claims that this is a common — and natural — occurrence when using WordPress, and that there's not a duplicate content issue to worry about. Is this true? Here's an example of the correct url. and... Here's an example of the same exact content, but using a different url. Notice that one is coming from /topics and the other is coming from /authors base. My understanding is that this is bad. Am I wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonMOZ1 -
Difference in Number of URLS in "Crawl, Sitemaps" & "Index Status" in Webmaster Tools, NORMAL?
Greetings MOZ Community: Webmaster Tools under "Index Status" shows 850 URLs indexed for our website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). The number of URLs indexed jumped by around 175 around June 10th, shortly after we launched a new version of our website. No new URLs were added to the site upgrade. Under Webmaster Tools under "Crawl, Site maps", it shows 637 pages submitted and 599 indexed. Prior to June 6th there was not a significant difference in the number of pages shown between the "Index Status" and "Crawl. Site Maps". Now there is a differential of 175. The 850 URLs in "Index Status" is equal to the number of URLs in the MOZ domain crawl report I ran yesterday. Since this differential developed, ranking has declined sharply. Perhaps I am hit by the new version of Panda, but Google indexing junk pages (if that is in fact happening) could have something to do with it. Is this differential between the number of URLs shown in "Index Status" and "Crawl, Sitemaps" normal? I am attaching Images of the two screens from Webmaster Tools as well as the MOZ crawl to illustrate what has occurred. My developer seems stumped by this. He has submitted a removal request for the 175 URLs to Google, but they remain in the index. Any suggestions? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Proper sitemap update frequency
I have 12 sitemaps submitted to Google. After about a week, Google is about 50% of the way through crawling each one. In the past week I've created many more pages. Should I wait until Google is 100% complete with my original sitemaps or can I just go ahead and refresh them? When I refresh the original files will have different URLs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Sitemap Submission
I was wondering if anyone has any insight into Sitemap submission with Google. I submitted a XML Sitemap for my new site at the end of October. Since then GWT says it is pending. l have made a few changes to the site and added some new pages so l decided to submit an updated XML sitemap. This was about a week ago and is also still pending. Does anybody know how long this process should take and if it is the reason why the site hasn't started ranking for any of our targeted search terms as yet? The site is www.theremovalistsguide.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Mobile Sitemap Issue
Hi there, I am having some difficulty with an error on Webmaster Tools. I'm concerned with a possible duplicate content penalty following the launch of my mobile site. I have attempted to update my sitemap to inform Google that a different mobile page exists in addition to the desktop page. I have followed Google's guidelines as outlined here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DBC01
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648 I'm having problems with my sitemap.xml file. Webmaster tools is reporting that it is not able to read the file and when I validate it I am getting an error stating that the 'Namespace prefix xhtml on link is not defined'. All I am trying to do is to create a sitemap that uses the rel="alternate" to inform Google that their is a mobile version of that specific page in addition to the desktop version. An instance of the code I am using is below: xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="gss.xsl"?> <urlset< span="">xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"> http://www.mydomain/info/detail/ <xhtml:link< span="">rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://m.mydomain.com/info/detail.html"/> <lastmod></lastmod>2013-02-01T16:03:48+00:00<changefreq></changefreq>daily0.50</xhtml:link<></urlset<> Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks0 -
Best url structure
I am making a new site for a company that services many cities. I was thinking a url structure like this, website.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3/cityname1-cityname2-cityname3-cityname4-cityname5. Will this be the best approach to optimize the site for the keyword plus 5 different cities ? as long as I keep the total url characters under the SeoMoz reccomended 115 characters ? Or would it be better to build separate pages for each city, trying to reword the main services to try to avoid dulpicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90