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
-
SITEMAP - Does <changefreq>and <image:title>have any apreciable effect?</image:title></changefreq>
Hi everyone. It was hard to find some actual evidence that some of the atributes to be declared in a sitemap have some real impact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Particularly, im interested in these two: <changefreq></changefreq> and**image:title</image:title>** I've used them in a few cases just to check their effect and couldnt see any.
Do you have any experience with these? Or any other atribute that might be helpful, in order to create a more accurate and effective sitemap? Also, this could be a great topic to create a new Moz Blog post, the one about sitemap is 8years old.0 -
Xml sitemap Issue... Xml sitemap generator facilitating only few pages for indexing
Help me I have a website earlier 10,000 WebPages were facilitated in xml sitemap for indexation, but from last few days xml sitemap generator facilitating only 3300 WebPages for indexing. Please help me to resolve the issue. I have checked Google webmaster indexed pages, its showing 8,141. I have tried 2-3 paid tools, but all are facilitating 3300 pages for indexing. I am not getting what is the exact problem, whether the server not allowing or the problem with xml sitemap generator. Please please help me…
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udistm0 -
Does Google Read URL's if they include a # tag? Re: SEO Value of Clean Url's
An ECWID rep stated in regards to an inquiry about how the ECWID url's are not customizable, that "an important thing is that it doesn't matter what these URLs look like, because search engines don't read anything after that # in URLs. " Example http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 Basically all of this: #!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 That is a snippet out of a conversation where ECWID said that dirty urls don't matter beyond a hashtag... Is that true? I haven't found any rule that Google or other search engines (Google is really the most important) don't index, read, or place value on the part of the url after a # tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
What are partial urls and why this is causing a sitemap error?
Hi mozzers, I have a client that recorded 7 errors when generating Xml sitemap. One of the errors appear to be coming from partial urls and apparently I would need to exclude them from sitemap. What are they exactly and why would they cause an error in the sitemap. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Hreflang Sitemap
Hi all, Have you ever created an hreflang sitemap using in-house resources or a third-party company for a group of over 70 sites, each with hundreds of pages and all with localised URLs? If so, would you mind sharing how you did it, or the contact details of the company you used? In this specific case there is nothing in the URL or code that I can use to group the alternatives automatically. Thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Do image sitemaps provide value for non e-commerce sites?
Is it worth putting together an image sitemap to submit to Google if you're not an e-commerce site? Also, if you're using a CDN like Amazon Web Services (cloudfront), can you even submit an image sitemap? According to Google you need to verify your CDN in webmaster tools if you're going to do so. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kking41201 -
How Do I Generate a Sitemap for a Large Wordpress Site?
Hello Everyone! I am working with a Wordpress site that is in Google news (i.e. everyday we have about 30 new URLs to add to our sitemap) The site has years of articles, resulting in about 200,000 pages on the site. Our strategy so far has been use a sitemap plugin that only generates the last few months of posts, however we want to improve our SEO and submit all the URLs in our site to search engines. The issue is the plugins we've looked at generate the sitemap on-the-fly. i.e. when you request the sitemap, the plugin then dynamically generates the sitemap. Our site is so large that even a single request for our sitemap.xml ties up tons of server resources and takes an extremely long time to generate the sitemap (if the page doesn't time out in the process). Does anyone have a solution? Thanks, Aaron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alloydigital0 -
Video XML Sitemap
I've been recently been information by our dev team that we are not allowed legally to make our raw video files available in a video XML sitemap...This is one of the required tags. Has anyone run into a similar situation and has figured out a way around it? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Margarita
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0