SEOMoz's Crawl Diagnostics showing an error where the Title is missing on our Sitemap.xml file?
-
Hi Everyone,
I'm working on our website Sky Candle and I've been running it as a campaign in SEOmoz. I've corrected a few errors we had with the site previously, but today it's recrawled and found a new error which is a missing Title tag on the sitemap.xml file.
Is this a little glitch in the SEOmoz system? Or do I need to add a page title and meta description to my XML file.
http://www.skycandle.co.uk/sitemap.xml
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I didn't think I'd need to add this.
Kind Regards
Lewis
-
This question has been raised here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/title-tag-on-sitemap-xml
You don't want a link to an XML sitemap - rather a HTML sitemap (as Ryan states)
You can use a tool like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com to generates sitemaps in both xml and html formats. HTML being the one to display on your website and the XML installed into the root directory www.skycandle.co.uk/sitemap.xml
I have generated one for you here for you to see - of course generate another if you want to change the parameters.
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/details-www.skycandle.co.uk.html
Don't worry about the XML sitemap too much as these aren't essential on smaller sites if all the pages of your site are indexing OK - as they should be picked up without the need to direct Search Engines them if the site has a clearly navigable structure.
Take a look at these articles for additional info http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xml-sitemaps-guidelines-on-their-use
and
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/expert-advice-on-google-sitemaps-verify-but-dont-submit
Of course the HTML sitemap is a useful tool for quick naviagation of your site and will improve your visitors experience on your site.
-
The crawl tool alerts you to issues which you may want to address. In this instance, the issue is a legitimate concern which should be corrected.
You offer a link to your sitemap.xml file in your footer. It can be helpful to offer a HTML sitemap to your site's visitors, but not a XML file. Either remove the link, or modify it to a HTML link.
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
-
Are the metrics in Moz's SERP analysis relevant in my area?
Our site (https://loco2.com/) specialises in train journey planning at ticket booking, so we want to improve our ranking when people search Google for a specific journey they want to make (eg "London to Barcelona by train"). We have a set of about 400 Guide pages (eg London to Barcelona) which we want people to find when they search for those journeys. I've been trying to find out why some of those pages do better than others in search, and what our competitors are doing better. I was hoping that the SERP analysis and Keyword Reports tool could help me with this, so I ran analyses for a set of the keyword phrases we want to rank for, but I was surprised to find that most of the metrics in both the basic and full reports don't seem to relate to how high in the search result a page ranks. The screengrab attached shows the results for "Brussels to Paris train", which are fairly typical - many of the top-ranking pages have fairly low scores for most metrics, and the metrics don't seem to have much effect on how high they are in the search results. ( I assume N/A means the Page Authority is very low, or is it not calculated for some other reason?) I looked into this a bit further by downloading full reports for 11 keyword searches, and comparing the average scores for each metric with the rank, but I still couldn't see any effects of the metrics on the ranks. If anything, pages with higher Page Authority and Domain Authority were further down in search rankings. Does this mean that link metrics aren't very important for the kinds of pages we're looking at? This makes sense to me, because if I'm searching for tickets from London to Barcelona I want to find a very specific results page which is unlikely to have many links, but I keep reading that link metrics are one of the most important factors in SEO. Am I misunderstanding something? wJ9uUcG
Moz Pro | | MargotLoco20 -
Can someone kindly explain what 'Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags' means? Is this a critical error and how can it be rectified?
Can someone kindly explain what 'Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags' means? Is this a critical error and how can it be rectified?
Moz Pro | | JoshMcLean0 -
Order of urls in SEOMoz crawl report
Is there any rhyme or reason to the order of urls in the SEOMoz crawl report, or are the urls just listed in random order?
Moz Pro | | LynnMarie0 -
Crawl diagnostics taking too long
I started a crawl 2 days ago and it was still going after almost 48 hours so I deleted the entire campaign and resubmitted it. It's been 13 hours and still going. What happened to getting initial results in 2 hours? I've never had this problem and have run several campaign crawls here. Just wondering if there is a known issue I just can't seem to find? Thank you
Moz Pro | | LisaS130 -
What's up with Yahoo and Bing in my keyword rankings?
SEOmoz is good I've learned a lot from it. I'm on my 3rd month and now have 8 keywords in top 50 for one site and 1 keyword in top 50 for another. This is for Google US. For Bing and Yahoo! US however I am still not in the top 50 for anything. I have read elsewhere that meta-tag page words can be regarded by these engines as a spam signal. In my meta I have used competative keywords that are relevant to my content, some of which are in the body, but are not my actual targeted keywords as a red-herring to potential competitors. Also might be usefull for other smaller places that still use meta-tags. Could not appearing in BingHoo! have something to do with their alogrithms and the meta-tags? or is it an SEOmoz issue? I have another question also. The " / " after a domain name doesn't appear in my Firefox address bar (I think I did a 301 redirect), but when I copy and paste it into an entry box (e.g. for a link submission) it puts the " / " there at the end which I take off. Does this make any difference?
Moz Pro | | Zoolander0 -
SEOMoz Crawl Warnings, do they really hurt rankings?
SEOMoz reports 250 crawl warnings on my site. In most cases its too long title tags, with 4 of them its missing meta description. SEOMoz says it will hurt my rankings? However, I'm sure a recent whiteboard Friday contradicted this. So what is it?
Moz Pro | | sanchez19600 -
Why is Roger crawling pages that are disallowed in my robots.txt file?
I have specified the following in my robots.txt file: Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/ Yet Roger is crawling these pages = 1,357 errors. Is this a bug or am I missing something in my robots.txt file? Here's one of the URLs that Roger pulled: <colgroup><col width="312"></colgroup>
Moz Pro | | MeltButterySpread
| example.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/19241/uenc/aHR0cDovL2ZyZXNocHJvZHVjZWNsb3RoZXMuY29tL3RvcHMvYWxsLXRvcHM_cD02/ Please let me know if my problem is in robots.txt or if Roger spaced this one. Thanks! |0
