A few sitemap questions
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1. When I do a sitemap through a generator, it lists some of my URLs twice, with and without the last slash. Ex:
<url><loc>http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-hollywood</loc><lastmod>2013-11-25T16:12:50+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.9</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-hollywood/</loc><lastmod>2013-11-25T16:14:27+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.69</priority></url>
Should I remove one of these or leave it?
2. What is the importance of lastmod? I've read that if you have a lastmod listed, Google won't recrawl until a new time/date is up?
3. This goes along with lastmod, but is changefreq important? Can it hurt me at all?
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If the tool is listing those URLs with and without the slash I guess you are linking to those pages with and without the ending slash. You should check your site and remove the one that shouldn't be there.
Also, check if the "wrong" version redirects to the "correct" one or at least has the "correct" URL in the canonical tag.
The lastmod should be the date that the page was last modified, however, most sitemap generators don't know when that was so they just use the timestamp and a changefreq daily to tell Google basically that they need to scrape the page everyday. In most cases, that's not the case as the page remains the same for years, but that won't hurt you at all as Google has its own methods to verify if a page has changed and "learn" how often your site/page updates that it needs to re-scrape it.
Hope that helps!
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If sitemap generator is generating two URLs that mean Google will also find two versions of the same page that might cause a duplication issue.
My advice would be to add a canonicalization on each page so that Google should know what the original URL of the page is. If website does not have many pages and adding a 301 redirection will not cause an impact on site speed, adding 301 to a preferred version of the URL is a good option too!
2<sup>nd</sup> question, Google won’t recrawl until the new time and date is up! I don’t think so, sitemap does help Google in crawling and indexing the site but I have seen website that get indexed who do not have sitemap on the website at all.
So, when a website with no sitemap can get indexed then chances are Google will come again with its time regardless of any modified date!
3<sup>rd</sup> question, Chance frequency will hurt? No! If you have a proper navigation on your website, Google will find all links anyways!!
Hope this helps
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