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.
Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?
-
Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke
-
Very much appreciated CleverPhD!
-
Found this while looking for a answer for another question could not find this the other day- right from the mouth of Google to not include pages that do not exist in XML sitemaps.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/best-practices-for-xml-sitemaps-rssatom.html
URLs
URLs in XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds should adhere to the following guidelines:
- Only include URLs that can be fetched by Googlebot. A common mistake is including URLs disallowed by robots.txt — which cannot be fetched by Googlebot, or including URLs of pages that don't exist.
-
Mate nailed it completely!
-
I would say make sure that your new sitemap has all the latest URLs. The reason people say that you should have old URLs in the sitemap is so that Google can quickly crawl the old URLs to find the 301s to the new URLs.
I am not convinced that this helps. Why?
Google already has all your old URLs in its systems. You would be shocked how far back Google has data on your site with old URLs. I have a site that is over 10 years old and I still see URL structures referenced in Google from 7 years ago that have a 301 in place. Why is this?
Google will assume that, "Well, I know that this URL is a 301 or 404, but I am going to crawl it every once in a while just to make sure the webmaster did not do this by mistake." You can notice this in Search Console error or link reports when you setup 301s or 404s, they may stay in there for months and even come back once they fall out of the error list. I had an occurrence where I had some old URLs showing up in the SERPs and various Search Console reports for a site for 2 years following proper 301 setups. Why was this happening?
This is a large site and we still had some old content still linking to the old URLs. The solution was to delete the links in that old content and setup a canonical to self on all the pages to help give a definitive directive to Google. Google then finally replaced the old URLs with the new URLs in the SERPs and in the Search Console reports. The point here being that previously our site was giving signals (links) that told Google that some of the old URLs were still valid and Google was giving us the benefit of the doubt.
If you want to have the new URLs seen by Google, show them in your sitemap. Google already has all the old URLs and will check them and find the 301s and fix everything. I would also recommend the canonical to self on the new pages. Don't give any signals to Google that your old URLs are still valid by linking to them in any way, especially your sitemap. I would even go so far as to reach out to any important sites that link to old URLs to ask for an updated link to your site.
As I mentioned above, I do not think there is an "advantage" of getting the new URLs indexed quicker by putting old URLs in the sitemap that 301 to the new URLs. Just watch your Google Search Console crawl stats. Once you do a major overhaul, you will see Google really crawl your site like crazy and they will update things pretty quick. Putting the old URLs in the sitemap is a conflicting signal in that process and has the potential to slow Google down IMHO.
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
-
Multiple Markups on The Same Page - Best Solution?
Hi there! I have a website that is build in react javascript, and I'm trying to use markup on my pages. They are mostly articles about general topics with common questions (about the topic), and for most articles I would like to use two markups: article markup + FAQ Markup ( for the questions in the article) article markup + how-to markup Can I do this or will Google get confused? Since I have two @type at the same time, for example @type": "FAQPage" and "@type": "Article". How should I think? I'm using https://schema.dev/ right now. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leowa0 -
New Subdomain & Best Way To Index
We have an ecommerce site, we'll say at https://example.com. We have created a series of brand new landing pages, mainly for PPC and Social at https://sub.example.com, but would also like for these to get indexed. These are built on Unbounce so there is an easy option to simply uncheck the box that says "block page from search engines", however I am trying to speed up this process but also do this the best/correct way. I've read a lot about how we should build landing pages as a sub-directory, but one of the main issues we are dealing with is long page load time on https://example.com, so I wanted a kind of fresh start. I was thinking a potential solution to index these quickly/correctly was to make a redirect such as https://example.com/forward-1 -> https:sub.example.com/forward-1 then submit https://example.com/forward-1 to Search Console but I am not sure if that will even work. Another possible solution was to put some of the subdomain links accessed on the root domain say right on the pages or in the navigation. Also, will I definitely be hurt by 'starting over' with a new website? Even though my MozBar on my subdomain https://sub.example.com has the same domain authority (DA) as the root domain https://example.com? Recommendations and steps to be taken are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markbwc0 -
Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index
I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains! company.com agency1.company.com agency2.company.com... I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google: demo.company.com demo.agency1.company.com demo.agency2.company.com... Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index? We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it? I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all. The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually. Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Where is the best place to put a sitemap for a site with local content?
I have a simple site that has cities as subdirectories (so URL is root/cityname). All of my content is localized for the city. My "root" page simply links to other cities. I very specifically want to rank for "topic" pages for each city and I'm trying to figure out where to put the sitemap so Google crawls everything most efficiently. I'm debating the following options, which one is better? Put the sitemap on the footer of "root" and link to all popular pages across cities. The advantage here is obviously that the links are one less click away from root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" (e.g. root/cityname) and include all topics for that city. This is how Yelp does it. The advantage here is that the content is "localized" but the disadvantage is it's further away from the root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" and include all topics across all cities. That way wherever Google comes into the site they'll be close to all topics I want to rank for. Thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
What's the best way to redirect categories & paginated pages on a blog?
I'm currently re-doing my blog and have a few categories that I'm getting rid of for housecleaning purposes and crawl efficiency. Each of these categories has many pages (some have hundreds). The new blog will also not have new relevant categories to redirect them to (1 or 2 may work). So what is the best place to properly redirect these pages to? And how do I handle the paginated URLs? The only logical place I can think of would be to redirect them to the homepage of the blog, but since there are so many pages, I don't know if that's the best idea. Does anybody have any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kking41200 -
What is the best way to embed PDF documents for SEO?
I have been using SCRIBD to embed PDF documents on my site but until recently I did not include the link back to SCRIBD. Will my site get credit for this content or will it go to SCRIBD? Is there a better way to embed PDF documents for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?
We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking. Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps? Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0