Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I include unnecessary pages in the sitemap.xml
-
I have a lot of pages that I don't want Google to index, so for most of them, I used cannonical, were they were duplicates, noindex were I wanted to remove the pages, but the question is: Should I include these pages in the sitemap.xml, or just the important pages?
Also should I include them in order to get the changes indexed fastet by Google?
-
That clearly changes my ideas about this ;-). As we're talking about a couple of million pages I wouldn't include them in the sitemaps then and to make sure they're absolutely made sure that it's noindexed.
-
One of the main problem is that there are a lot of such pages (aprox. 2-3 milions) and my indexation rate is really slow for a site this big. The old sitemap structure was to complex, and I wanted so simplify it, so Google wiil crawl only the important pages
-
Hi Silviu,
Hard question, related to your use case I would suggest not to include them. But on the other hand it also shouldn't harm your performance as the URLs in a sitemap are mostly meant to search engines as a full list of URLs they might miss otherwise. It would also help you to see what your indexation rate is. Curious to see what other people think about this.
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
-
Do you need to include the top menu on every single page of the site in the code?
When using cache: on google, and clicking on Text-only version, our site has the top menu gibberish on top? My feeling is that this take away SEO juice from our title and focus keyword. Our website is culinarydepotinc.com
On-Page Optimization | | Sammyh1 -
Category pages, should I noindex them?
Hi there, I have a question about my blog that I hope you guys can answer. Should I no index the category and tag pages of my blog? I understand they are considered as duplicate content, but what if I try to work the keyword of that category? What would you do? I am looking forward to reading your answers 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | lucywrites0 -
Is it better to keep a glossary or terms on one page or break it up into multiple pages?
We have a very large glossary of over 1000 industry terms on our site with links to reference material, embedded video, etc. Is it better for SEO purposes to keep this on one page or should we break it up into multiple pages, a different page for each letter for example? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | KenW0 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
XML Sitemaps for Property Website
Hi all, I was hoping that someone might have a link to a good example of an XML Sitemap for a large property (real estate) website? Thanks in advance to anyone who does! 🙂 Gavin
On-Page Optimization | | IcanAgency0 -
No follow for html sitemap?
Hi, I have been working on an e-commerce site and have been wondering if i should add the meta robot tag with no follows, on pages like delivery , terms, returns and the html sitemap? From what I have read this seems a good idea, but i am a little confused as what to do with the html sitemap. I can understand that having this on the homepage will allow crawlers quick access to the deeper pages within the site. But would it be better to guide them down the natural route of the category navigation instead? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Bmeisterali0 -
Should I include a "|" for better page title SEO results?
I have seen many sites that include the "|" in page titles and was wondering if there is some SEO value in the practice. Example: Product Name | Company Name Instead of: Product Name by Company Name I have not seen any value in it myself other than a good way to avoid stop words. I wanted to make sure. Currently I have the "by" included in the page titles.
On-Page Optimization | | JedHenning0 -
Page speed tools
Working on reducing page load time, since that is one of the ranking factors that Google uses. I've been using Page Speed FireFox plugin (requires FireBug), which is free. Pretty happy with it but wondering if others have pointers to good tools for this task. Thanks...
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0