Best practices for migrating an html sitemap? Or just get rid of it all together?
-
We are migrating a very large site to a new CMS and I'm trying to determine the best way to handle all the links (~15k) in our html sitemap. The developers don't see the purpose of using an html sitemap anymore and I have yet to come up with a good reason why we should migrate rather than just get rid of the sitemap since it is not very useful to users. The html sitemap was created about 6 years ago when page rank sculpting was a high priority.
Currently, since we already have an XML sitemap, I'm not sure that there's really a need for a html sitemap, other than to maintain all the internal links. How valuable are the internal links found in an html sitemap? And will it be a problem if we remove these from our link profile? 15,000 links sounds significant, but they only account for less than .5% of our internal links.
What do all you think?
-
any thoughts on the impact of removing the internal links in the sitemap? will this hurt our domain authority? Or given the low amount of links compared to our whole link profile, is it not that significant to cause concern?
-
I think the need for html site maps has past, they can be useful for visitors to the site but when you get to higher number of links it can become mind blowing and confusing.
You should aim to have good hierarchic structured navigation on the site with plenty of use of breadcrumbs to make it easier to navigate the site.
what ever you do -make sure you have the keep the XML site map in place.
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
-
Sitemaps:
Hello, doing an audit found in our sitemaps the tag which at the time was to say that the url was mobile. In our case the URL is the same for desktop and mobile.
Technical SEO | | romaro
Do you recommend leaving or removing it?
Thank you!0 -
On our site by mistake some wrong links were entered and google crawled them. We have fixed those links. But they still show up in Not Found Errors. Should we just mark them as fixed? Or what is the best way to deal with them?
Some parameter was not sent. So the link was read as : null/city, null/country instead cityname/city
Technical SEO | | Lybrate06060 -
600+ 404 Errors: Best Practice for Redirects?
Hi All, I've just checked my GWMT profile for one of my client's sites and found that there are currently over 600 404 Error notifications! This is not that surprising given that we very recently redesigned and launched their new corporate site, which previously had a ton of "junk" legacy pages. I was wondering if it would work in terms of efficient SEO to simply apply a 301 redirect from the 404 page to our root to solve this issue? If not what would be a good solution? Thanks in advance for all your great advice!
Technical SEO | | G2W1 -
How do I get rid of rogue listings?
Unfortunately, Google has taken bits and pieces of my business and combined it with non-existent businesses and other rogue information. So now my business has 3 locations. One proper listing that I created and manage. One that uses my website address but nothing else is correct in the listing. One that contains my name(incorrectly), but the address and everything else about it is incorrect. I have reported these places many times but they continue to hang around and I am lost/confused on what to do next. Please advise.
Technical SEO | | dignan990 -
Different HTML based on resolution
Is it acceptable in terms of SEO to display different HTML based on a users resolution size? I feel I'm wasting space on my site catering for all the 1024 x 768ers
Technical SEO | | niallfred0 -
Best Personna Strategy
I'm building a site for a manufacturer where all products will be entered as blog posts. Then I have to build some awareness for the site. What personna am I best off doing this with? Company Name, My Name, A ficticious name that works for the company, or some other? Any Mozzers want to share thoughts or past strategies that have been successful?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Should XML sitemaps include *all* pages or just the deeper ones?
Hi guys, Ok this is a bit of a sitemap 101 question but I cant find a definitive answer: When we're running out XML sitemaps for google to chew on (we're talking ecommerce and directory sites with many pages inside sub-categories here) is there any point in mentioning the homepage or even the second level pages? We know google is crawling and indexing those and we're thinking we should trim the fat and just send a map of the bottom level pages. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | timwills0 -
Is having a sitemap.xml file still beneficial?
Hi, I'm pretty new to SEO and something I've noticed is that a lot of things become relevant and irrelevant like the weather. I was just wondering if having a sitemap.xml file for Google's use is still a good idea and beneficial? Logically thinking, my websites would get crawled faster by having one. Cheers.
Technical SEO | | davieshussein0
