Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Adding multi-language sitemaps to robots.txt
-
I am working on a revamped multi-language site that has moved to Magento. Each language runs off the core coding so there are no sub-directories per language.
The developer has created sitemaps which have been uploaded to their respective GWT accounts. They have placed the sitemaps in new directories such as:
- /sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml
- /sitemap/de/sitemap.xml
I want to add the sitemaps to the robots.txt but can't figure out how to do it. Also should they have placed the sitemaps in a single location with the file identifying each language:
- /sitemap/uk-sitemap.xml
- /sitemap/de-sitemap.xml
What is the cleanest way of handling these sitemaps and can/should I get them on robots.txt?
-
Adding the following lines to the bottom of your robots.txt should do it:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap/de/sitemap.xml
If you wanted to update the file names to be different it wouldn't hurt, but I don't think you would have any problems with how they are currently set up. If you have submitted them to WMT and they are being picked up ok I think you are fine.
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
-
Same URL for languages sub-directories
Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages, example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Google indexing despite robots.txt block
Hi This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Empty Meta Robots Directive - Harmful?
Hi, We had a coding update and a side-effect of that was that our directive was emptied, in other words it now reads as: on all of the site. I've since noticed that Google's cache date on all of the pages - at least, the ones I tested - have a Cached date of no later than 17 December '12 - that's the Monday after the directive was removed on mass. So, A, does anyone have solid evidence of an empty directive causing problems? Past experience, Matt Cutts, Fishkin quote, etc. And then B - It seems fairly well correlated but, does my entire site's homogenous Cached date point to this tag removal? Or is it fairly normal to have a particular cache date across a large site (we're a large ecommerce site). Our site: http://www.zando.co.za/ I'm having the directive reinstated as soon as Dev permitting. And then, for extra credit, is there a way with Google's API, or perhaps some other tool, to run an arbitrary list and retrieve Cached dates? I'd want to do this for diagnosis purposes and preferably in a way that OK with Google. I'd avoid CURLing for the cached URL and scraping out that dates with BASH, or any such kind of thing. Cheers,
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Host sitemaps on S3?
Hey guys, I run a dynamic web service and I will start building static sitemaps for it pretty soon. The fact that my app lives in a multitude of servers doesn't make it easy to distribute frequently updated static files throughout the servers. My idea was to host the files in AWS S3 and point my robots.txt sitemap directive there. I'll use a sitemap index so, every other sitemap will be hosted on S3 as well. I could dynamically mirror the content from the files in S3 through my app, but that would be a little more resource intensive than just serving the static files from a common place. Any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tanlup0 -
No indexing url including query string with Robots txt
Dear all, how can I block url/pages with query strings like page.html?dir=asc&order=name with robots txt? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | HMK-NL0 -
Do I need an XML sitemap?
I have an established website that ranks well in Google. However, I have just noticed that no xml sitemap has been registered in Google webmaster tools, so the likelihood is that it hasn't been registered with the other search engines. However, there is an html sitemap listed on the website. Seeing as the website is already ranking well, do I still need to generate and submit an XML sitemap? Could there be any detriment to current rankings in doing so?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
How to generate a visual sitemap using sitemap.xml
Are there any tools (online preferably) which will take a sitemap.xml file and generate a visual site map? Seems like an obvious thing to do, but can't find any simple tools for this?
Technical SEO | | k3nn3dy30 -
Is blocking RSS Feeds with robots.txt necessary?
Is it necessary to block an rss feed with robots.txt? It seems they are automatically not indexed (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html) And, google says here that it's important not to block RSS feeds (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/using-rssatom-feeds-to-discover-new.html) I'm just checking!
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0