Best practice for XML sitemap depth
-
We run an eCommerce for education products with 20 or so subject based catalogues (Maths, Literacy etc) and each catalogue having numerous ranges (Counting, Maths Games etc) then products within those. We carry approximately 15,000 products.
My question is around the sitemap we submit - nightly - and it's depth. It is currently set to cover off home, catalogues and ranges plus all static content (about us etc). Should we be submitting sitemaps to include product pages as well? Does it matter or would it not make much difference in terms of search.
Thanks in advance.
-
Site-map is very important for telling Google about our pages, Using site-maps has many benefits, not only easier navigation but we can get better visibility by search engines. You can submit around 35000 pages in your site-map. It is only way that you can immediate say to search engine about any changes in your site. Your question is about including product pages in site-map right? so ya, you can submit your product pages in site-map, if you are adding your product pages search engine will recognize your pages, so it will increase your site visibility and visitors.
-
I would add in the products also. The sitemap's there to help the search engines crawl your site - the products are the pages you want to be indexed for sure.
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
-
Best Practices for Image Optimisation
Hi Guys, I would love some recommendations from you all. A potential client of mine is currently hosting all their website image galleries (of which there are many) on a flickr account and realise that they could gain more leverage in Google images (currently none of their images cover off any of the basics for optimisation eg filename, alt text etc), I did say that these basics would at least need to be covered off and that Image hosting is supposedly an important factor especially when it comes to driving traffic from Google Image Search. (potentially images hosted on the same domain as the text are given more value than the images hosted at another domain like websites such as Flickr). The client has now come back saying they have done some 'reading' and that this suggests a sub-domain could be the way to go, e.g. images.mydomain.com - would love feedback on this before I go back to them as it would be a huge undertaking for them. Cheers
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
Will an XML sitemap override a robots.txt
I have a client that has a robots.txt file that is blocking an entire subdomain, entirely by accident. Their original solution, not realizing the robots.txt error, was to submit an xml sitemap to get their pages indexed. I did not think this tactic would work, as the robots.txt would take precedent over the xmls sitemap. But it worked... I have no explanation as to how or why. Does anyone have an answer to this? or any experience with a website that has had a clear Disallow: / for months , that somehow has pages in the index?
Technical SEO | | KCBackofen0 -
What sitemap generator for mac for php web
i would like to generate a sitemap for my web, and i have mac computer, can you advise me about what site map use
Technical SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Product landing page URL's for e-commerce sites - best practices?
Hi all I have built many e-commerce websites over the years and with each one, I learn something new and apply to the next site and so on. Lets call it continuous review and improvement! I have always structured my URL's to the product landing pages as such: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category/product-name Now this has always worked fine for me but I see more an more of the following happening: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/product-name Now I have read many believe that the longer the URL, the less SEO impact it may have and other comments saying it is better to have the just the product URL on the final page and leave out the categories for one reason or another. I could probably spend days looking around the internet for peoples opinions so I thought I would ask on SEOmoz and see what other people tend to use and maybe establish the reasons for your choices? One of the main reasons I include the categories within my final URL to the product is simply to detect if a product name exists in multiple categories on the site - I need to show the correct product to the user. I have built sites which actually have the same product name (created by the author) in multiple areas of the site but they are actually different products, not duplicate content. I therefore cannot see a way around not having the categories in the URL to help detect which product we want to show to the user. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | yousayjump0 -
Benefits to having an HTML sitemap?
We are currently migrating our site to a new CMS and in part of this migration I'm getting push-back from my development team regarding the HTML sitemap. We have a very large news site with 10s of thousands of pages. We currently have an HTML sitemap that greatly helps with distributing PR to article pages, but is not geared towards the user. The dev team doesn't see the benefit to recreating the HTML sitemap despite my assurance that we don't want to lose all these internal links since removing 1000s of links could have a negative impact on our Domain Authority. Should I give in and concede the HTML sitemap since we have an XML one? Or am I right that we don't want to get rid of it?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Sitemap.xml showing up in Google Search
Hello when I do a Google search my sitemap.xml shows up for lots of queries. Does anyone have any advise on this? Should I remove url in Google Webmaster? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
What are your best tips for SEO on a shopping cart?
So, I am working on a shopping cart platform (X-Cart) and so far don't like it. Also, the web designer is not someone I've worked with before and he is understandably conservative about access--which limits what I can and cannot do from the back end. One of the things I like to do is include text for the search engines. However, based on conversion, etc., I think the product images on a landing page (main brand info with specific products that show up) should show up first to move toward conversion first. I am thinking of adding the text below the product images on the brand pages so the viewer sees the products first while still keeping the content seo. My practice is to use between 300-350 words minimum on a page. Just wondering what best practices you have for a shopping cart. Care to share? Any tips or hints? Thoughts on what I might do that would be most effective? As always, thanks in advance for your sage advice!
Technical SEO | | TheARKlady0 -
What are the SEOmoz-suggested best practices for limiting the number of 301 redirects for a given site?
I've read some vague warnings of potential problems with having a long list of 301 redirects within an htaccess file. If this is a problem, could you provide any guidance on how much is too much? And if there is a problem associated with this, what is that problem exactly?
Technical SEO | | roush0
