Does Sitemap really matters today?
-
Hi.
Our website has multiple subdomians and domain platform is wordpress. But we haven't submitted sitemap to Google. Is this Okay? Or it's mandatory to submit sitemap? Is submitting a sitemap gonna help us in ranking improvement?
-
Hi,
Yes! They're still important, in itself they won't give you any ranking boost as it will only increase the easiness for the search engines to crawl your pages. So they will find all your pages on your site more easily. If you're already using WordPress you can easily set up your plugins to provide you with sitemaps, don't forget to add them in a line to your robots.txt and definitely make sure you submit them in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Martijn.
-
Hi,
Yes it does matter and every site should have sitemaps.
Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own. A sitemap is just there to help Google (and other search engines) crawl and hopefully index all your content.
If you are not using sitemaps for your site I would suggest you to submit sitemaps.
Thanks
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
-
Should we include URLs with parameters in the sitemap?
Hi, I wanted to know whether we can include URLs with search parameters in the sitemap. Currently, we are trying to append structured data for our job listing page. There happens to be a large number of job listings around 1000 pages with unique job-id and location. Should we add these pages in the sitemap or is there any other solution to this? Regards, Tejas
Algorithm Updates | | tejasbansode0 -
Do the referring domains matter a lot in back-links? Google's stand?
Hi, It's a known fact about quality of back-links than quantity. Still domains are heavily different from links. Multiple domains are huge comparing to multiple links. Taking an average, how much does 'number of referring domains" boost website authority? I am not speaking about low quality domains, just number of domains including which are irrelevant to the topic or industry. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Does it matter? 404 v.s. 302 > Page Not Found
Hey Mozers, What are your thoughts of this situation i'm stuck in all inputs welcome 🙂 I am in the middle of this massive domain migration to a new server. Also we are going to be having a very clean SEO friendly url structure. While I was doing some parsing and cleaning up some old urls I stumbled upon a strange situation on my website. I have a bunch of "dead pages" and they are 302'd to a "page not found" probably a old mistake of one of the past developers. (To clarify the HTTP Status code is not 404) Should I try to fight to get all these "dead pages" a 404 error code or could I just leave the temp redirect 302 > "page not found" ( even though I know for a fact theses pages are not going to turn on again)
Algorithm Updates | | rpaiva0 -
Sitemap Question - Should I exclude or make a separate sitemap for Old URL's
So basically, my website is very old... 1995 Old. Extremely old content still shows up when people search for things that are outdated by 10-15+ years , I decided not to drop redirects on some of the irrelevant pages. People still hit the pages, but bounce... I have about 400 pages that I don't want to delete or redirect. Many of them have old backlinks and hold some value but do interfere with my new relevant content. If I dropped these pages into a sitemap, set the priority to zero would that possibly help? No redirects, content is still valid for people looking for it, but maybe these old pages don't show up above my new content? Currently the old stuff is excluded from all sitemaps.. I don't want to make one and have it make the problem worse. Any advise is appreciated. Thx 😄
Algorithm Updates | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
How effective are nofollow links today (2013) ?
Hi, We had a question about the effectiveness of nofollow today. Nofollowing some links on pages was to make sure pagerank flows to content which is most relevant and useful to visitors on the site. Looking at the 2009 article, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow, it seems that adding the meta tag nofollow would no longer help us in ensuring this goal. We had a couple of questions: 1. Do you think Google today only passes pagerank to dofollow links
Algorithm Updates | | SEMEnthusiast
2. Are sites today using iframes/javascript to make sure googlebot passes pagerank to only relevant pages
3. Any other best practice you would suggest Thanks0 -
How much is Page Rank really worth?
We are in a position to purchase a domain, made of relevant keywords to our company with a current page ranking of 4 for their home page. However in looking at their analytics and other information they do not do well on significant keywords and have very low site traffic. In fact they do very, very poorly. With their high page ranking would it be relatively easy to conduct a successful SEO campaign on the domain if we were to take it over as our own and attempt to climb in the SERP's? I know Page Rank doesn't mean everything when it comes to your ranking, but 4 is relatively high in our field, so I don't really understand why they do so poorly when it comes to their actual rankings on key words.
Algorithm Updates | | absoauto0 -
Is a New Visits ratio of 39% a really bad thing?
I do a lot of work for a large estate agency based almost solely in London. They get a considerable amount of traffc and all other stats, on the whole, are always positive. The only thing that is decreasing regularly is the percentage of new traffic. My understanding of user behaviour for this market is that no one in their right mind would make an enquiry or arrange a booking without a) looking at the property at least twice themeselves (once to before the enquiry and once before a viewing) and b) more than likely show a partner. Plus the site is well laid out and useful so I believe users are favouring our site over the comparison sites. So questions: Should I be panicing What is the most efficent way of increasing new visits? Things to note: The HTML titles throughout the site are a bit of a mess - key word rich but too long and inconsistent. Could this be a contributing factor to the CTR? Also in the past month we appeared in over 4k different queries but our non branded impressions are down 22%. Could more concise, less keyword stuffed HTML titles help this? Do I need to look at the page titles to ensure that they contain the exact phrases that are in decline? Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | SoundinTheory0 -
Today all of our internal pages all but completely disappeared from google search results. Many of them, which had been optimized for specific keywords, had high rankings. Did google change something?
We had optimized internal pages, targeting specific geographic markets. The pages used the keywords in the url title, the h1 tag, and within the content. They scored well using the SEOmoz tool and were increasing in rank every week. Then all of a sudden today, they disappeared. We had added a few links from textlink.com to test them out, but that's about the only change we made. The pages had a dynamic url, "?page=" that we were about to redirect to a static url but hadn't done it yet. The static url was redirecting to the dynamic url. Does anyone have any idea what happened? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | h3counsel0