Should 301-ed links be removed from sitemap?
-
In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
-
I'm going to disagree a little bit with the other commenters. I've done quite a few large scale redirect projects and I'm not 100% opposed to using a "dirty sitemap" for a short duration. The better option is to leave some internal links pointed at the old URLs. I know what the search engines say, but I also know what I've experienced when it comes to getting 301'd links crawled again.
Read this post by Everett Sizemore for more info at what I'm describing:
http://moz.com/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well
-
"A sitemap should only contain links to active pages."
Hi shawn81
Alex is absolutely correct there.
In fact, Duane Forrester has said repeatedly that Bing absolutely does not like to find such pages in a sitemap and that you should make sure there are never 3XX, 4XX or 5XX status pages included because it will stop Bingbot from crawling your site.
While Googlebot is not so sensitive, the reality is that all search engines allocate a certain amount of crawl capacity for your site...if your sitemaps include a load of pages that are not likely to be indexed, the result is twofold:
- you are wasting capacity on useless pages and the crawler may never get to the stuff you really want indexed
- if the crawler encounters a lot of non-active pages when it crawls, future crawl capacity (not to mention trust) is likely to be reduced
Replace the old URLs with the new and give the bots a little thrill of adventure
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
There shouldn't be any 301 links in a sitemap. A sitemap should only contain links to active pages. So in your case, you should remove all the 301 links and replace them with the new links.
Couple notes - Having 301 links in your sitemap won't hurt your site or SEO unless the sitemap is so huge that you need to split it up into multiple files. But you should really only have the final links in the sitemap, neither people nor bots want to be redirected around. If you properly 301'd the crawlers will automatically update their links.
Changing links around in the sitemap generally won't hurt your site. Especially if the links no longer exist and you're improving the list. There are very few cases where making changes will hurt the site.
-
We have had a problem with this ourselves. We put a 301 redirect on our domain when we were building a new site (went from new. to www.) and search engines are still crawling the new. domain. Bing webmaster tools registers it as an error because they can't find the old site. I would lean toward removing it just because your users are probably being redirected somewhere they wouldn't necessarily want to go.
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
-
Getting 'Indexed, not submitted in sitemap' for around a third of my site. But these pages ARE in the sitemap we submitted.
As in the title, we have a site with around 40k pages, but around a third of them are showing as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" in Google Search Console. We've double-checked the sitemaps we have submitted and the URLs are definitely in the sitemap. Any idea why this might be happening? Example URL with the error: https://www.teacherstoyourhome.co.uk/german-tutor/Egham Sitemap it is located on: https://www.teacherstoyourhome.co.uk/sitemap-subject-locations-surrey.xml
Technical SEO | | TTYH0 -
Internal no follow links
I have just discovered that the WordPress theme I have been using for some time has no follow internal links on the blog. Simply put each post has an image and text link plus a 'read more'. The Read more is a no-follow which is also on my homepage. The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow. What is your opinion on this? Should I spend time removing the no follow?
Technical SEO | | Libra_Photographic0 -
Link profile
Hi All, I am doing a link profile audit I have few questions 1. Should i stop worrying about backlinks that i once had and now the websites is down or page is 404 2. The link is nofollow Also i have 60% of my site links few root link and many articles/blogs links pasted in sites without any anchor text, should i worry about them? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Removing links - Best practice
Hi I have noticed on webmaster that I have a lot of links to my sites from link building directories. Either I did this many years a go or somehow they've linked to me. Would links to link building directories harm my site? i.e linkspurt.com pingerati.net I have quite a few and just wondering what to do with them. Also I have some customer sites which are massive one site has 38,000 links coming to my site as I have put a credit that I built the site with a link back to mine. It has a low score in Google would this also harm my site? Any advise would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
External Links Discrepancy
Hello folks Apologies for my ignorance, but a SEO novice here… One of our competitors boasts over 300,000 external links, however when we analysed their links via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org we can only see around 10,000 in there “Number of Domains Linking to this Page” section. Can someone please assist and point out something which I assume is painfully obvious! Cheers, Chris
Technical SEO | | footyfriends0 -
Track outbound links
I would like to track outbound links at http://bit.ly/yYHmbf 1. Shall i add the following code before at the above page What does 100 means in above code ? 2. Then use this for each outgoing link ``` [onClick="recordOutboundLink(this, 'Outbound Links', 'example.com');return false;">](http://www.example.com) ``` [](http://www.example.com) ```[``` http://www.example.com is the outbound link Am i right on both counts ? where should i look for report in GA ? ```](http://www.example.com)
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
More than 1 XML Sitemap
I recently took over administration of my site and I have 2 XML sitemaps for my main site and 1 XML sitemap for my blog (which is a sub-page of the main site). Don't I only need 1 sitemap for my site and one for my blog? I don't know which one to delete - they both has the same page authority. Also, only 1 of them is accessible by browser search. http://www.rmtracking.com/rmtracking-sitemap.xml - accessible in browser http://www.rmtracking.com/sitemap.xml - regularly updated in Google Webmaster Tools but not accessible in search browser. I don't have any error messages in Webmaster tools.
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0