Is URL appearance defined by crawling or by XML sitemap
-
I am having a problem developing a sitemap because I have long URLs that are made by zend. They go like this: http://myagingfolks.com/professionals/20661/social-workers/pennsylvania-civi-stanger
Because these URL's are long and are fed by Zend when I try to call them all up, to put on the sitemap, the system runs out of memory and crashes.
Do you know what part of a search result, in google, say, comes from the URL? Would it be fine for me to submit to google only www.myagingfolks.com/professionals/20661. Does the crawler find that the URL is indeed http://myagingfolks.com/professionals/20661/social-workers/pennsylvania-civi-stanger or does it go with just what the sitemap tells it?
-
Hi Joe,
THanks for the response. One thing: given that my URL structure gets everything beyond /professional/number/blah blah blah from Zend, does that automatically count as a 301 forward. Meaning, if I get the entire URL in the sitemap, will I still awaken the ire of the google-god?
thanks
-
Google is going to go to the pages submitted in the sitemap and see that they are serving a 301 response code, which they don't want to see in sitemaps. Either find a way to create a sitemap for the URLs you want to use (this is what I'd do) or shorten your URLs so they work with your sitemapping solution (although it is not a good idea to change URL structure because of a software limitation).
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
-
Link reclamation and many 301 redirect to one URL
We have many incoming links to a non existing pages of a sub-domain, which we are planning to take down or redirect to a sub-directory. But we are not ready to loose pagerank or link juice as many links of this sub-domain are referred from different external links. It's going to be double redirect obviously. What is the best thing we can go to reclaim these links without loss of link juice or PR? Can we redirect all these links to same sub-domain and redirect the same sub-domain to sub-directory? Will this double redirect works? Or Can we redirect all these links to same sub-domain and ask visitors to visit sub-directory, manual redirection? How fair to manually redirect visitors? Any other options? Thanks, Satish
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Are SEO Friendly URLS Less Important Now That Google Is Indexing Breadcrumb Markup?
Hi Moz Community and staffers, Would appreciate your thoughts on the following question: **Are SEO friendly URLS less important now that Google is indexing breadcrumb markup in both desktop and mobile search? ** Background that inspired the question: Our ecommerce platform's out of the box functionality has very limited "friendly url" settings and would need some development work to setup an alias for more friendly URLS. Meanwhile, the breadcrumb markup is implemented correctly and indexed so it seems there's no longer an argument for improved CTR with SEO friendly URLS . With that said I'm having a hard time justifying the URL investment, as well as the 301 redirect mapping we would need to setup, and am wondering if more friendly URLs would lead to a significant increase in rankings for level of effort? Sidenote: We already rank well for non-brand and branded searches since we are brand manufacturer with an ecommerce presence. Our breadcrumbs are much cleaner & concise than our URL structure. Here are a couple examples. Category URL: http://www.mysite.com/browse/category1/subcat2/subcat3/_/N-7th
Algorithm Updates | | jessekanman
Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3 Product URL: http://www.mysite.com/product/product-name/_/R-133456E112
Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3 > product name The "categories" contain actual keywords just hiding them here in the example. According to my devs they can't get rid of the "_" but could possible replace it with a letter. Also they said it's an easier fix to make the URLs always lower case. Lastly some of our product URLS contain non-standard characters in the product name like "." and "," which is also a simpler fix according to my developers. Looking forward to your thoughts on the topic! Jesse0 -
How Additional Characters and Numbers in URL affect SEO
Hi fellow SEOmozers, I noticed that a lot of websites have additional characters and words at the end of the URL in addition keyword optimized URL. Mostly for E-Commerce sites For example: www.yoursite.com/category/keyword?id=12345&Keyword--Category--cm_jdkfls_dklj or wwww.yoursite.com/category/keyword#83939=-37292 My question is how does the additional characters or parameters(not necessarily tracking parameters) affect SEO? Does it matter if i have additional keywords in the additional stuff in the URL (1st url example)? If you can provide more information, that would be helpful. Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | TommyTan0 -
Our root domain is no longer appearing in search results
Hi all The root domain for our site, roadtrippers.com, has been disappearing from Google's search results. Subfolders and subdomains still appear, but our root domain isn't found at all. I believe I've verified this by searching "-inurl:trips -inurl:byways -inurl:support -inurl:blog -inurl:places -inurl:guides -inurl:destinations site:https://roadtrippers.com/" in Google and our root domain is nowhere to be found. This may or may not be related to another issue we've had, where the root domain is appearing with a seemingly rotating set of parameters. Sometimes it'll be ?mod=, sometimes it'll be ?tag=translation. Originally they appeared to simply displace our ranking root domain, but now they and our root domain are completely disappearing. Our dev team believes they fixed the problem with recent 301 tags to any unapproved parameter being added to the root domain, but this hasn't fixed the original problem. Any insight into this is greatly appreciated! Brandon
Algorithm Updates | | brandonRT0 -
Any results appearing state side from the roll out of in-depth articles?
I've noticed today that Google are not serving my author profile up in the SERPs, last night it was fine but today they've all gone. Could this be due to the release of in-depth articles? Has anyone else who is using rel author/publisher seen their profiles disappear. My pages are still in the same rank position but the information has been reverted to a previous state. I'm in the UK and unsure what determines a Google roll-out in terms of time scale, so I wanted to see if in-depth articles are starting to make their mark in the SERPs in the USA or Canada. Thanks for any input on this question. UPDATE BELOW ** I've decided to update this question with my own possible answer just in case it is helpful to any one. I see today that my Author/Publisher profile have now come back to my pages in SERPs, which I'm happy to see. I am an avid user of creating annotations in GA for each activity/change I make on my sites. The other day I wanted to test the impact on changing my profile pic to my company's logo identity - so I recorded this in GA as a date point of reference. My pic was changed to the logo and voila it started to appear in search. Why did I do this? Well our logo is a kind of high viz green box and pretty well stands out amongst the 10 blue lines and sponsored ads. I wanted to see if this would attract people's attention - should we not experiment??. For a time it worked but as you will see from my question my profile was essentially removed. Does Google watch out for this? It does not, for instance, serve our logo/profile for web pages where the author and the publisher are the same, meaning the company is the author and the publisher. I can see that Google are requesting that for in-depth articles they would like you to use the schema mark-up for organizational logos for your articles - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/using-schemaorg-markup-for-organization.html. You will see in this posting quite a lot of discussion on logo size, code location, optimal settings etc. There seems to be a hint that the logo size should be around 50k and 230x230px. So maybe this is the route we need to take in order for your brand's identity to be served with your content. I'll be trying this out on some of my content and wait and see. If anyone else is working on thism trying out new ways to serve their content using schema mark-up it would be great to hear from you. Best David David
Algorithm Updates | | David-E-Carey0 -
What is the point of XML site maps?
Given how Google uses Page Rank to pass link juice from one page to the next if Google can only find a page in an XML site map it will have no link juice and appear very low in search results if at all. The priority in XML sitemaps field also seems pretty much irrelevant to me. Google determines the priority of a page based on the number of inbound links to it. If your site is designed properly the most important pages will have the most links. The changefreq field could maybe be useful if you have existing pages that are updated regularly. Though it seems to me Google tends to crawl sites often enough that it isn't useful. Plus for most of the web the significant content of an existing page doesn't change regularly, instead new pages are added with new content. This leaves the lastmod field as being potentially useful. If Google starts each crawl of your site by grabbing the sitemap and then crawls the pages whose lastmod date is newer than its last crawl of the site their crawling could be much more efficient. The site map would not need to contain every single page of the site, just the ones that have changed recently. From what I've seen most site map generation tools don't do a great job with the fields other than loc. If Google can't trust the priority, changefreq, or lastmod fields they won't put any weight on them. It seems to me the best way to rank well in Google is by making a good, content-rich site that is easily navigable by real people (and that's just the way Google wants it). So, what's the point of XML site maps? Does the benefit (if any) outweigh the cost of developing and maintaining them?
Algorithm Updates | | pasware0 -
Regarding site url structure
OK so there are already some answers to questions similar to this but mine might be a little more specific. OK website is www.bestlifeint.com Most of our product pages are as such: http://www.bestlifeint.com/products-soy.html for instance. However I was trying to help the SEO for certain pages (namely two) with the URL's and had some success with another page our Soy Meal Replacement I changed the site URL of this page from www.bestlifeint.com/products-meal to www.bestlifeint.com/Soy-Amazing-Meal-Replacement-with-Omega-3s.html (notice I dropped the /product part of url and made it more seo friendly. The old page for this page was something like www.bestlifeint.com/products-meal The issue is that recently this new page and another page I have changed http://www.bestlifeint.com/Whey-Milk-Alternative.html I have dropped the "/product" on the URL even though they are both products. The new Meal Replacement page used to be ranked like 6th on google at the begining of the month and now is like 48th or something. The new "whey milk" page (http://www.bestlifeint.com/Whey-Milk-Alternative.html) is ranked like 45th or something for "Whey Milk" when the old page...."products/wheyrice.html" was ranked around 18th or so at the begining of the month. Have I hurt these two pages by not following www.bestlifeint.com/product.... site structure? And focusing more on the URL SEO? I have both NEW pages receiving all link juice inside web site so they are the new pages (can not go to old page) and recently seeing that google has pretty much dropped the old pages in search rankings I have deleted these two pages. Do i just need to just wait and see? According to my research we should rank much higher for "Whey Milk" we should be on the first page according to googles own statements of searchers finding good relevant material. Any advice moving forward? Thanks, Brian
Algorithm Updates | | SammisBest0 -
Similar URLs
If I have two similar urls: www.investormill.com/unemployment-rate and www.investormill.com/unemployment-rate-annual Would this confuse search engines or "cannibalize" my content? For clarity: the first page would provide data on the monthly unemployment rate, the second would provide an annual unemployment rate figure. So, there would be a unique series on each page. Just trying to figure out how to best approach this when crafting urls. Thanks for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | investormill0