Sitemap use for very large forum-based community site
-
I work on a very large site with two main types of content, static landing pages for products, and a forum & blogs (user created) under each product. Site has maybe 500k - 1 million pages. We do not have a sitemap at this time.
Currently our SEO discoverability in general is good, Google is indexing new forum threads within 1-5 days roughly. Some of the "static" landing pages for our smaller, less visited products however do not have great SEO.
Question is, could our SEO be improved by creating a sitemap, and if so, how could it be implemented? I see a few ways to go about it:- Sitemap includes "static" product category landing pages only - i.e., the product home pages, the forum landing pages, and blog list pages. This would probably end up being 100-200 URLs.
- Sitemap contains the above but is also dynamically updated with new threads & blog posts.
Option 2 seems like it would mean the sitemap is unmanageably long (hundreds of thousands of forum URLs). Would a crawler even parse something that size? Or with Option 1, could it cause our organically ranked pages to change ranking due to Google re-prioritizing the pages within the sitemap?
Not a lot of information out there on this topic, appreciate any input. Thanks in advance. -
Agreed, you'll likely want to go with option #2. Dynamic sitemaps are a must when you're dealing with large sites like this. We advise them on all of our clients with larger sites. If your forum content is important for search then these are definitely important to include as the content likely changes often and might be naturally deeper in the architecture.
In general, I'd think of sitemaps from a discoverability perspective instead of a ranking one. The primary goal is to give Googlebot an avenue to crawl your sites content regardless of internal linking structure.
-
Hi
Go with option 2, there is no scaling issue here. I have worked with and for sites that have a high multiplier on the number of sitemaps and pages that they're submitting, in some cases up to 100M pages. In all cases, Google was totally fine in crawling and processing the data that was there. As long as you follow the guidelines (max 50K URLs in a sitemap) you're fine as you're just providing another file that usually doesn't exceed about 50MB (depending on if you also add images to the sitemap). If you have an engineering team build the right infrastructure you can easily deal with thousands of these files and run them automated every day/week.
My main focus on big sites is also to streamline their sitemaps to have sitemaps with just the last 50.000 pages and the same for the last 50.000 pages that were updated. This way you're able to also monitor the indexation level of these pages. If you are able to, for example, combine the data from log file analysis you can say: we added 50K pages and Google in the last days were able to crawl X percentage of that.
Hope this gives you some extra insights.
Martijn.
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
-
Site redesign makes Moz Site Crawl go haywire
I work for an agency. Recently, one of our clients decided to do a complete site redesign without giving us notice. Shortly after this happened, Moz Site Crawl reported a massive spike of issues, including but not limited to 4xx errors. However, in the weeks that followed, it seemed these 4xx errors would disappear and then a large number of new ones would appear afterward, which makes me think they're phantom errors (and looking at the referring URLs, I suspect as much because I can't find the offending URLs). Is there any reason why this would happen? Like, something wrong with the sitemap or robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | YYSeanBrady1 -
Old forum with 404s, what should I do?
Hello, So I'm helping out some friends with their SEO. I've just run a Screaming Frog crawl of their entire site (which took hours and hours I might add). They used to have a forum connected to the site, which is no longer active. Google is still indexing all of the old URLs, which unsurprisingly return 404 errors. What should they do to prevent Google from indexing these pages? That's assuming they need to do anything at all. They don't have access to these old forum posts and therefore won't be able to fix the URL or resource adding a 301 redirect pointing to the most relevant alternate page. I'm new to SEO but my instinct is that they need to have the page return a 410 ‘Gone’ response code to give search engines a clear signal that the page no longer exists and won’t be returning, and removing the internal links to that URL or resource. 1. Is this interpretation correct?
Technical SEO | | jordanayresaira
2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot 3. What should I recommend?0 -
Why don't sites using Drupal have keywords
Why don't the vast majority of sites using Drupal list keywords in the head section? Is there another convention used in Drupal that serves the same purpose for SEO? I noticed most of the Drupal info pages about keywords seem to drop off around 2010
Technical SEO | | fxarechiga0 -
Site Indexed but not Cached?
I launched a new website ~2 weeks ago that seems to be indexed but not cached. According to Google Webmaster most of the pages are indexed and I see them appear when I search site:www.xxx.com. However, when I type into the URL - cache:www.xxx.com I get a 404 error page from Google.
Technical SEO | | theLotter
I've checked more established websites and they are cached so I know I am checking correctly here... Why would my site be indexed but not in the cache?0 -
Dear Support, my client is a large bank and his site is https. and seomoz does not give any data. what can i do ? thank you
Dear Support, what to do in case of https pages. seomoz does not give any data about it. please help asap. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | SebestynMrton0 -
Which is more accurate? site: or GWT?
when viewing urls in google's index, is it more accurate to refer to site:www.domain.com or google webmaster tools (urls in web index)?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
.CA site same as .com site - are both necessary?
Dear Friend, We representa a major national brand in the auto care industry, and they have locations in both US and Canada. There is a primary content site at .com that we have duplicated at .ca. We are hosting the .ca site on a separate IP on a server in Canada - but by in large it is the same site. (there are some minor changes we made to change US English to Canadian English - though minor. When we search Google.ca we generally see strong search results for the .com site, but rarely, if ever any evidence of rankings for the .ca site. The .com site was launched several years ago about 18 months before the .ca site. Why doesn't Google.ca show the .ca site? Is this an issue of duplicate content, and Google.ca simply shows the .com version which it knew about first? Are we wasting our time, money and efforts having both? Thanks, Tim ps. this isn't about location. We use a separate site to locate local shops, and have coordinated that well with Google Places, and when looking for local auto care - we do well in both US and Canada. The sites described above are largetl content sites.
Technical SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
Base href
Does it matter for SEO if one uses a base href meta tag or if it is defined using java script?
Technical SEO | | cindyt-170380