Broken sitemaps vs no sitemaps at all?
-
The site I am working on is enormous. We have 71 sitemap files, all linked to from a sitemap index file.
The sitemaps are not up to par with "best practices" yet, and realistically it may be another month or so until we get them cleaned up.
I'm wondering if, for the time being, we should just remove the sitemaps from Webmaster Tools altogether. They are currently "broken", and I know that sitemaps are not mandatory. Perhaps they're doing more harm than good at this point? According to Webmaster Tools, there are 8,398,082 "warnings" associated with the sitemap, many of which seem to be related to URLs being linked to that are blocked by robots.txt.
I was thinking that I could remove them and then keep a close eye on the crawl errors/index status to see if anything changes.
Is there any reason why I shouldn't remove these from Webmaster Tools until we get the sitemaps up to par with best practices?
-
I think you can remove the sitemap since it returns so many warnings.
I don't think sitemaps have so much seo benefits but rather helps google find pages that are hard to find in your site or no accessible through regular href.
So make sure your site has a good structure and that all page can be found by browsing your site (click on links from pages to pages) and you will be fine sitemap or not.
Use linksleuth to crawl your site, if you are not sure of the accessibility of all pages.
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
-
Only a fraction of the sitemap get indexed
I have a large international website. The content is subdivided in 80 countries, with largely the same content all in English. The URL structure is: https://www.baumewatches.com/XX/page (where XX is the country code)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lvet
Language annotations hreflang seem to be set up properly In the Google Search Console I registered: https://www.baumewatches.com the 80 instances of https://www.baumewatches.com/XX in order to geo target the directories for each country I have declared a single global sitemap for https://www.baumewatches.com (https://www.baumewatches.com/sitemap_index.xml structured in a hierarchical way) The problem is that the site has been online already for more than 8 months and only 15% of the sitemap URLs have been indexed, with no signs of new indexations in the last 3 months. I cannot think about a solution for this.0 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Short Url vs Medium Urls ?
Hello Moooooooooooz ! I got a SEO fight today and though the best would be to involve more people into the fight ! 😛 Do you think it's better to get A- company.com/services/service1.html or B- company/service1.html I was for A as services is also googled to find the service1. I also think that it's better to help google to understand where the service is on the website My friend was for B as URL has to stay as short as possible What do you think ? ps: I can create the URL I want using Joomla and Sh404. The websites has 4 different categoies: /about, /services/ products, /projects Tks ! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Mobile Sitemap Best Practices w/ Responsive Design
I'm looking for insight into mobile sitemap best practices when building sites with responsive design. If a mobile site has the same urls as the desktop site the mobile sitemap would be very similar to the regular sitemap. Is a mobile sitemap necessary for sites that utilize responsive design? If so, is there a way to have a mobile sitemap that simply references the regular sitemap or is a new sitemap that has all urls tagged with the "" tag with each url required?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamDorfman0 -
Which metrics are better for linkback when it comes to PA vs DA?
Which metrics would be more attractive for receiving a linkback from, at least in theory, from the examples below? Gettting a link from a high PA page on a low DA site or gettting a link from a low PA page but on a high DA site, or something in the middle with both (assuming all other factors similar). For example which of these page metrics would be more preferable to be listed on? site 1: PA:19, DA:75 site 2: PA:1, DA:80 site 3: PA:39, DA:55 Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Keeping the Navigation on the Sitemap HTML Page?
Hey everyone. We are about to create a sitemap.html page and have always just kept the site theme in place and put the sitemap in the "content" section of the page, with the header navigation, sidebars and footer in place. Well, now with the new "only first link counts" Google rule, wouldn't it be better to just have a "plain" html sitemap page without any other links on it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO0