Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Include Cross Domain Canonical URL's in Sitemap - Yes or No?
-
I have several sites that have cross domain canonical tags setup on similar pages. I am unsure if these pages that are canonicalized to a different domain should be included in the sitemap. My first thought is no, because I should only include pages in the sitemap that I want indexed.
On the other hand, if I include ALL pages on my site in the sitemap, once Google gets to a page that has a cross domain canonical tag, I'm assuming it will just note that and determine if the canonicalized page is the better version. I have yet to see any errors in GWT about this. I have seen errors where I included a 301 redirect in my sitemap file. I suspect its ok, but to me, it seems that Google would rather not find these URL's in a sitemap, have to crawl them time and time again to determine if they are the best page, even though I'm indicating that this page has a similar page that I'd rather have indexed.
-
I looked at the sitemap, and they are including the http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz but not the canonical page - http://www.masternewmedia.org/entrepreneurship-the-full-story-of-seomoz-told-by-rand-fishkin/
So based on this example, the page on SEOMoz is still included in the sitemap, regardless if it has a canonical or not.
This seems to make sense, since canonical links are used only as a hint and not an absolute directive.
I also noticed that Google is choosing to index and rank both pages, on Page 1.
SEOMoz is ranking higher on my browser for "the full story of seomoz". A few things going on here.
-
Why is google choosing to rank SEOMoz higher than Mastermedia.org for this page? There's a canonical setup, but google is choosing not to follow it. (again its a hint not an absolute) this doesn't always work.
-
I would think Google would be able to filter out the duplicate content easy. In this example, they are clearly not. SEOMoz is ranking #4 and Masternewmedia.org is ranking #5 for query "the full story of seomoz"
-
-
Right - as far as I know, you're supposed to put end URLs into a sitemap, not urls which 301 redirect. Cross domain canonical is still kind of new, but I would treat them as a 301 redirect and not include them in a sitemap.
Now, if you're curious, SEO Moz did a whiteboard Friday where they talked about this same exact issue (cross domain canonical), and as an experiment, re-posted a blog article from another blogger on SEO Moz.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday
http://www.seomoz.org/blog-sitemap.xml
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz
The blog is still included in the blog sitemap. I think it probably won't 'hurt' to keep those pages in the sitemap, since a lot of sitemaps automatically generated CMS tools won't have been updated to deal with this yet.
-
There is no BIG problem if you add the pages that contain cross domain canonical tag on them. Why?
The reason why I can say this is because Google is not only indexing the pages from sitemap.xml file, Google have their own crawler and they have the ability to crawl and index the website no matter if you do not have an xml sitemap.
Google is very good at (in my opinion) picking the instructions that are available on the page so if you add the page in the xml sitemap, the crawler will read the instructions on the page and will only index the page that contain original content.
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
-
Move to new domain using Canonical Tag
At the moment, I am moving from olddomain.com (niche site) to the newdomain.com (multi-niche site). Due to some reasons, I do not want to use 301 right now and planning to use the canonical pointing to the new domain instead. Would Google rank the new site instead of the old site? From what I have learnt, the canonical tag lets Google know that which is the main source of the contents. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | india-morocco0 -
Switching URLs after acquisition to retain domain authority?
Hey everyone! My company just acquired our biggest competitor and we're switching to their platform because they have a better technical structure for SEO--what's the best way to do that, other than a 301 redirect? Can we even rename their domain to ours? How do we ensure we keep both our and their domain authority and SEO juice? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | genevieveagar0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
404's - Do they impact search ranking/how do we get rid of them?
Hi, We recently ran the Moz website crawl report and saw a number of 404 pages from our site come back. These were returned as "high priority" issues to fix. My question is, how do 404's impact search ranking? From what Google support tells me, 404's are "normal" and not a big deal to fix, but if they are "high priority" shouldn't we be doing something to remove them? Also, if I do want to remove the pages, how would I go about doing so? Is it enough to go into Webmaster tools and list it as a link no to crawl anymore or do we need to do work from the website development side as well? Here are a couple of examples that came back..these are articles that were previously posted but we decided to close out: http://loyalty360.org/loyalty-management/september-2011/let-me-guessyour-loyalty-program-isnt-working http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/mark-johnson-speaks-at-motivation-show Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
What Happens If a Hreflang Sitemap Doesn't Include Every Language for Missing Translated Pages?
As we are building a hreflang sitemap for a client, we are correctly implementing the tag across 5 different languages including English. However, the News and Events section was never translated into any of the other four languages. There are also a few pages that were translated into some but not all of the 4 languages. Is it good practice to still list out the individual non-translated pages like on a regular sitemap without a hreflang tag? Should the hreflang sitemap include the hreflang tag with pages that are missing a few language translations (when one or two language translations may be missing)? We are uncertain if this inconsistency would create a problem and we would like some feedback before pushing the hreflang sitemap live.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Chinese Sites Linking With Bizarre Keywords Creating 404's
Just ran a link profile, and have noticed for the first time many spammy Chinese sites linking to my site with spammy keywords such as "Buy Nike" or "Get Viagra". Making matters worse, they're linking to pages that are creating 404's. Can anybody explain what's going on, and what I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
Hi, I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page. However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's. I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this? Any advice welcomed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
How to prevent 404's from a job board ?
I have a new client with a job listing board on their site. I am getting a bunch of 404 errors as they delete the filled jobs. Question: Should we leave the the jobs pages up for extra content and entry points to the site and put a notice like this job has been filled, please search our other job listings ? Or should I no index - no follow these pages ? Or any other suggestions - it is an employment agency site. Overall what would be the best practice going forward - we are looking at probably 20 jobs / pages per month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90