Redirects in site map

[aimiyo]

I have a site with the ace/sef  ( creates friendly URLS) in a large data base site.

It creates a site map dynamically.

Yet I realize one issue which I am trying to think through.

I recently changed my urls to include an ID number

example: homepage/houses/1134-big-blue-house

The prior url was:  homepage/houses/big-blue-house

the original url above redirects to the new one with the ID like I want.

However the site map has both URLS in it which go to same page

I am not sure but it seems rather stupid to have the new URL and OLD redirected URL in the site map. Yet beside stupid I am wondering if this is duplicate content and will cause a penalty from the google bot.

What is your opinion ?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Howdy,

Actually, in the short-term, it may be beneficial to list both in your sitemap.

The reason for this is that you want search engines to try and crawl the "old" url to process the 301 that it finds there. The quicker they visit the old URL, the faster they will realize the page is redirecting, and this actually will reduce any perceived duplicated content issues on the part of the search engines.

Generally, you would do this with 2 sitemaps - one with the old URLs and one listing the new, and submit them both to Google via Webmaster Tools. You would leave the old one in place for 30 days before removing it.

After 30 days, however, it's best to use a single sitemap with only one set of URLs. As Ben mentioned, you don't want search engines wasting crawling resources on forever trying to visit URLs that redirect.

So after a time, it would be best to remove the old URLs from the sitemap. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the AceSEF Joomla package, but I believe there is a way to configure it to remove those URLs - even if manually according to the feature set: http://www.joomace.net/blog/xmap-joomap-sef-sm-2-and-acesef

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[BenRWoodard]

I would not be afraid of duplicate content more than I would be afraid of diminishing value of your site's focus because the bot is wasting resources on the 301's.