To include in Sitemap or not to include?
-
Hello all,
A bit of a confusing one but please bear with me...
On our website we have a Used Cars section where each morning a feed is loaded onto our site with any changes to the stock. Some cars may have been sold and removed, some new cars may be added, some prices may be changed, every day every morning this very large section of our website is updated.
The question I have is, should I be including these urls in my sitemap? The Used Cars section is a huge portion of our website content and is our most important area, the Used Cars overview is our most frequently visited page.
The reason I ask is because of course Google might crawl and see car X, but tomorrow car X could be gone and be replaced with car Y. Should I be even mentioning these pages to Google if by tomorrow some of those urls could be gone? It's always changing and it's something we don't have control of.
Thanks!
-
Thank you for your suggestions!
Essentially, yes we want to tell Google this page is there, but to not 'trick it' and then that page disappears just as Google finds it resulting in a 404.
We're going to get a sitemap generated each day as so much content changes on the site anyway, but No Indexing and 301'ing is something we'll then give a go.
I'll keep you posted on progress!
Thanks!
-
I would put the content in the sitemap, and once the cars are gone I would remove the items from the sitemap and put up 301 redirects to either the car category page or a similar page. The article below does a pretty good job explaining.
-
Hi Michele,
First of all, I would try to include it in sitemap. Than I'd do the following:
- For all the cars that you have sold, I'd try to implement a noindex, follow (and keep the page alive for the following few days, giving time to Google to crawl these URLs again).
- Every day a sitemap should be generated, then pinged (check Google's "best practices for sitemaps" article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ro/2014/10/best-practices-for-xml-sitemaps-rssatom.html and the ping protocol: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#submit_ping)
That's my personal approach. But might be that others come up with better ideas.
I hope it helped.
Gr., Keszi
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
-
Should I submit an additional sitemap to speed up indexing
Hi all, Wondered if there was any wisdom on this that anyone could impart my way? I'm moving a set of pages from one area of the site to another - to bring them up the folder structure, and so they generally make more sense. Our URLs are very long in some cases, so this ought to help with some rationalisation there too. We will have redirects in place, but the pages I'm moving are important and I'd like the new paths to be indexed as soon as possible. In such an instance, can I submit an additional sitemap with just these URLs to get them indexed quicker (or to reaffirm that indexing from the initial parse)? The site is thousands of pages. Any benefits / disadvantages anyone could think of? Any thoughts very gratefully received.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ceecee0 -
Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?
We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?1 -
Xml sitemap only shows up sometimes (magento)
Hi Moz community, I'm using Magento platform. I can generate a sitemap using their xml generator, but it will only pull up sometimes in web explorers, the rest of the time it will show a 404 page. GWT also tells me that I get a 404 error when testing the sitemap, but sometimes it will acknowledge that it's there. Anyone had this problem before or know how to help. sitemap= www.ice.com/sitemap.xml Let me know what other information I can provide to help. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
XML Sitemap Index Percentage (Large Sites)
Hi all I'm wanting to find out from those who have experience dealing with large sites (10s/100s of millions of pages). What's a typical (or highest) percentage of indexed pages vs. submitted pages you've seen? This information can be found in webmaster tools where Google shows you the pages submitted & indexed for each of your sitemap. I'm trying to figure out whether, The average index % out there There is a ceiling (i.e. will never reach 100%) It's possible to improve the indexing percentage further Just to give you some background, sitemap index files (according to schema.org) have been implemented to improve crawl efficiency and I'm wanting to find out other ways to improve this further. I've been thinking about looking at the URL parameters to exclude as there are hundreds (e-commerce site) to help Google improve crawl efficiency and utilise the daily crawl quote more effectively to discover pages that have not been discovered yet. However, I'm not sure yet whether this is the best path to take or I'm just flogging a dead horse if there is such a ceiling or if I'm already at the average ballpark for large sites. Any suggestions/insights would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danng0 -
Sitemaps / Google Indexing / Submitted
We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml Which has over 1,400 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,200 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages. Any help would be appreciated! Aron sitemap.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
Create a new XML Sitemap for a blog subdomain?
What would be the best way to go about this? A site just put a blog on http://blog.domain.com/ Should there be a separate XML Sitemap for that particular subdomain or should the original XML Sitemap for the main domain be sufficient? Looking forward to your responses. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0