Should I include tags in sitemap?
-
Hello All,
I was wondering if you should include tags and categories in your sitemap. In the past on previous blogs I have always left tags and categories out. The reason for this is a good friend of mine who has been doing SEO for a long time and inhouse always told me that this would result in duplicate content.
I thought that it would be a great idea to get some input from the SEOmoz community as this obviously has a big affect on your blog and the number of pages indexed.
Any help would be great.
Thanks,
Luke Hutchinson.
-
Hi Dan The Yoast Seo plug in for Wordpress allows you to select what you want included on sitemaps. Mine currently includes posts, pages, categories, and video Are you suggesting to only include pages in the sitemap? Why wouldn't we want to include the others?
-
Hey Luke
Assume you mean XML Sitemap?
You should only include pages in your sitemap, which also are indexed. So then the question becomes, should you index tags or categories. I firmly believe, so long as the site is set up correctly, you should not index tags but it's OK to index categories. I also assume you're using WordPress.
So the steps become;
1. Noindex tag archives.
2. Then exclude tags from the XML sitemap.
You can refer to my WordPress SEO guide on Moz for more details.
Good luck!
-Dan
-
Luke,
at this moment a new website is developed for me using Modx CMS. In here I had build a blog because I want to start blogging too. The funny part of it is that in many cases blog software creates duplicate content if you post an article and also have it stored in the archives etc. Modx does not seem to be doing that (so far as I tested it).
Maybe that would be something too look into?
The archives should be linking to the same article as the overview page does. The more tags and the more categories helps the user define what they are looking for and that ought to be a good thing. Here in the SEOmoz community you can also filter out certain blog messages, for instance if you only want to see white-board Friday messages that's possible. And I believe that these do not result in duplicate content issues.
Hope this helps you
Regards
Jarno
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
-
Alt Tags on HTML5 Videos
We are wanting to add alt tags to all of our non-text content, from experience, what is the best method for alt tags for HTML5 Videos?
Technical SEO | | hydra_creative0 -
Alt Tags - how important for SEO?
Hi I know alt tags should be on an image, however at the moment I have 23,741 missing on the site, how important are these? It's a big project for someone to update & I need some justification Thanks Mozzers 🙂
Technical SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
GWT Duplicate Content and Canonical Tag - Annoying
Hello everyone! I run an e-commerce site and I had some problems with duplicate meta descriptions for product pages. I implemented the rel=canonical in order to address this problem, but after more than a week the number of errors showing in google webmaster tools hasn't changed and the site has been crawled already three times since I put the rel canonical. I didn't change any description as each error regards a set of pages that are identical, same products, same descriptions just different length/colour. I am pretty sure the rel=canonical has been implemented correctly so I can't understand why I still have these errors coming up. Any suggestions? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Moving a site including meta data
If a website is moved to a new server, how can you ensure that all meta data moves with it?
Technical SEO | | jazavide0 -
Wordpress multilanguage sitemaps
Hi, I have a multilingual wordpress site. which is in Bulgarian and English - translated using qtranslate. The xml sitemap of the 2 languages is in one sitemap file- all the links for the Bulgarian and English version are in one file. (Our web is using this plugin - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-v3-for-qtranslate Do you have any idea how can I make separate xml sitemap for every language? I ask you here because may be you have identical problems with your multilanguage wordpress website. You can see the sitemap with 2 languages links in one sitemap here: http://cholakovit.com/ sitemap.xml Cholakov IT I have read from this article that it is better practise and also it will help with geo-targetazing your web site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic
Technical SEO | | vladokan0 -
Sitemap.xml - autogenerated by CMS is full of crud
Hi all, hope you can help. the Magento ecommerce system I'm working with autogenerates sitemap.xml - it's well formed with priority and frequency parameters. However, it has generated lots of URLs that are pointing to broken pages returning fatal erros, duplicate URLs (not canonicals), 404s etc I'm thinking of hand creating sitemap.xml - the site has around 50 main pages including products and categories, and I can get the main page URLs listed by screaming frog or xenu. Then I'll have to get into the hand editing the crud pages with noindex, and useful duplicates with canonicals. Is this the way to go or is there another solution thanks in advance for any advice
Technical SEO | | k3nn3dy30 -
Image optimisation, alt and title tags
Is making the alt and title tags in an image the same bad for seo? Does anyone have any recommendations? any help much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0