I need an XML sitemap expert for 5 minutes!
-
Hi all!
I'm hoping that someone with a lot of experience with XML sitemaps can help me out here...
When submitting my sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, these are the results:
2,414,714 Submitted
34,721 IndexedAnd there's also tonnes of warnings.
Would anyone be able to take a quick look at these sitemaps to perhaps advise me on what's going wrong there? These do not load without the www, not sure if this is an issue?
http://www.eumom.ie/sitemap.xml
http://www.eumom.ie/sitemap.xml.gzThanks everyone in advance!!
Gavin
-
Few rules about sitemaps;
-
You should only include in them pages you also want crawled and indexed
-
They should not contain URLs with 404s or blocked by robots.txt
My guess is there are too many URLs in the sitemaps, since I'd guess the website is not over 2 million actual "real" pages,
Also, I randomly clicked on a URL in one of the sitemaps and it 404'd;
http://www.eumom.ie/forums/topic/oakhill-school-leopardstown-/
This is probably causing a lot of the errors you see. It's honestly not a 5 minute fix - but if it were my site, I would be using the Yoast SEO plugin and using the sitemap feature within Yoast. It makes it very easy to include / exclude certain pages and updated automatically etc.
I think there must be a way to tell your plugin what to include / exclude from the sitemap but I don't have as much experience with it.
But generally - only include pages you want crawled and indexed. Don't include pages that 404.
-
-
Hi all,
Many thanks for your input so far, much appreciated!
The sitemaps that you are seeing actually were generated using that plugin you mentioned. Formatting-wise, do you see anything wrong with the sitemaps?
Thanks!!
Gavin -
I couldn't agree more altecdesign!
http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ all the way!
-
That XML sitemap you linked too is formatted in an odd way. I noticed the site you are generating the xml sitemap for is based in wordpress. There is a really solid sitemap plugin you could use to generate your XML and submit to google instead of the current plugin you are using: http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
I've used that plugnin numerous times and submitted sitemaps to google with no errors. Hopefully that helps you out.
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
-
Sitemap.xml Site multilang
HI all, I have some questions about multilang sitemap.xml. So, we use the same domain subdirectories with gTLDs example.com/pt-br/
Technical SEO | | mobic
example.com/us/
example.com/es/ How should I do the sitemap.xml in this case? I thought of three alternatives: Should I do a sitemap_index.xml to each lang and make categories for these sitemaps? Examples:
http://www.example.com/pt-br/sitemap_index.xml
http://www.example.com/en/sitemap_index.xml
http://www.example.com/es/sitemap_index.xml Should I do only one sitemap_index.xml covering all categories of all languages ? Examples:
http://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml
http://www.example.com/pt-br/sitemap_categorias_1.xml
http://www.example.com/es/sitemap_categorias_1.xml
http://www.example.com/us/sitemap_categorias_1.xml Should I do a sitemap setting all multilang? <url><loc>http://www.example.com/us/</loc>
<xhtml:link <br="">rel="alternate"
hreflang="es"
href="http://www.example.com/pt-br/"
/>
<xhtml:link <br="">rel="alternate"
hreflang="us"
href="http://www.example.com/us/"
/>
<xhtml:link <br="">rel="alternate"
hreflang="pt-br"
href="http://www.example.com/pt-br/"
/></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></url> Thanks for any advice.0 -
URL Structure - Is this correct? Programming Advice Needed
Hello My father is having a website built called www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk. The site consists of different product categories as set out below 1.Engineered Wood, 2. Parquet & Reclaimed and 3. Prefinished Wood filtering further into colours 1. /lights-greys/, 2. /beiges/, 3, /browns/ and 4. /darks-blacks and then the brand name for example Vicenza. Example of a clean url **http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys/vicenza/ ** Each and every url is unique Our programmer has put in place 301 redirects - http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys-engineered-wood/vicenza/ - Is this really needed? It does not look clean and will appear like this is Google. This is a completely new site, a new start up business. I'm very confused as to why he has done this and concerned this method of programming does now follow "best practice". Can any programmer offer any advice? To get a better idea how the url structure is set out, I have attached a jpg image. Thank you Faye W09qswW.jpg
Technical SEO | | Faye2341 -
XML Sitemap and unwanted URL parameters
We currently don't have an XML sitemap for our site. I generated one using Screaming Frog and it looks ok, but it also contains my tracking url parameters (ref=), which I don't want Google to use, as specified in GWT. Cleaning it will require time and effort which I currently don't have. I also think that having one could help us on Bing. So my question is: Is it better to submit a "so-so" sitemap than having none at all, or the risks are just too high? Could you explain what could go wrong? Thanks !
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
Small blog needs paid SEO help
I looked at Moz's recommended companies but they are all for huge blogs and websites. I cannot afford those fees. My blog is small but growing and was hit by a Google Panda tweak back in July. My organic traffic disappeared overnight and although I've been working hard to improve my blog, I still get no organic traffic after being on the first page. I would like to pay someone to look at my site and give me help but I cannot pay what these huge companies are asking for. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | blogger20130 -
Using a single sitemap for multiple domains
We have a possible duplicate content issue based on the fact that we have a number of websites run from the same code base across .com / .co.uk / .nl / .fr / .de and so on. We want to update our sitemaps alongside using the href lang tags to ensure Google knows we've got different versions of essentially the same page to serve different markets. Google has written an article on tackling this:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en but my question remains whether having a single sitemap accessible from all the international domains is the best approach here or whether we should have individual sitemaps for each domain.
Technical SEO | | jon_marine0 -
Proxy Server & Wordpress - Need Help
I'm looking for some guidance/expert opinions on using a proxy server with Wordpress. When a consumer goes to ourwebsite.com/blog, our IT department would like to set up the request to be “proxied” to the Wordpress Blog site. They would like to add a header to the web request to identify that traffic as coming from through the proper URL. Should someone or a crawler attempt to access the WordPress site directly (blog.ourwebsite.com) they would be client side redirected to the proper URL ourwebsite.com/blog. This is WAY out of my league here, so I figured I would ask the experts. Will this negatively effect our SEO?
Technical SEO | | SavikaTilakhdin0 -
I need help on web page load time, its very bad!
Note: This is KILLING my customer experience. Here is my webpage: http://www.stbands.com Here is a speed test that may help you (look at the poor ratings in the upper corner) http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110628_MW_Y8CQ/1/details/ I have an F on "Cache Static Content" - anyone know how I can fix this? Also, it is a e-commerce website hosted through core commmerce. I have some access to code but not all of it. Some of it is dynamic. However, if you tell me specific things I can forward it to their very awesome tech department. They are very willing to work with me and are now considering implementing a CDN after I schooled them. Any help is greatly appreciated. Don't be afraid to get very technical - I may not understand it, but the engineers there will.
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0 -
Is "last modified" time in XML Sitemaps important?
My Tech lead is concerned that his use of a script to generate XML sitemaps for some client sites may be causing negative issues for those sites. His concern centers around the fact that the script generates a sitemap which indicates that every URL page in the site was last modified at the exact same date and time. I have never heard anything to indicate that this might be a problem, but I do know that the sitemaps I generate for other client sites can choose server response or not. What is the best way to generate the sitemap? Last mod from actual time modified, or all set at one date and time?
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0