XML Sitemaps for Message Boards / Forums - Best Practices?
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I'm working with a message board that has been around for 10+ years and never taken SEO best practices into consideration. They recently started seeing mobile URLs show up in regular results, which they don't want. I'm recommending they implement multiple sitemaps to properly indicate to Google how to crawl the site and what to index. I've never dealt with a site this large so I'm not sure best practices. They have a HUGE community and new URLs are created every second. Doing a site: search returns "About 12,100,000" URLs. What are some best practices / the best way to approach sitemaps for a site of this size?
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Very Helpful.
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A lot depends on what the mobile forum is - a separate url or just a css change? Read this
In the end, you need to tell Google what version of the site to serve to regular visitors and which to serve to mobile users.
If it's such a big forum, the crawlers are probably constantly on the site anyways so sitemaps would do you less good than optimizing the actual forum.
However, if you are inclined to create a sitemap, consider making a sitemap index and splitting up the threads/sections/replies into separate sitemaps (at your discretion). The goal being that each sitemap is updated as often as the next the crawler can keep up with it (so if sitemap gets checked 3 times a day, make sure all the links that need to be crawled would probably appear during those 3 checks)
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