301's - Do we keep the old sitemap to assist google with this ?
-
Hello Mozzers,
We have restructured our site and have done many 301 redirects to our new url structure.
I have seen one of my competitors have done similar but they have kept the old sitemap to assist google I guess with their 301's as well.
At present we only have our new site map active but am I missing a trick by not have the old one there as well to assist google with 301's.
thanks
Pete
-
Awesome , Many thanks All !!.
Much Appreciated
Pete
-
Thanks Donna!
-
To reinforce what Dirk has stated, I'm sharing a similar question that was asked a month ago - "Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?" The question was answered by CleverPhD. I like how he talks about how Google interprets the change, impacts you might see in Google's Search Console, and what to do about it.
It's worth the read.
-
You shouldn't keep the old sitemap. If the pages are in the index - Google will figure it out the next time when the bot is visiting the site. Make sure that you update all the internal links (avoid internal redirects) - Screaming Frog will do miracles here.
If you would keep the old one you will get warnings like this:
"When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL."
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Does creating too many parent pages damage my website's SEO?
I need to know how to keep my website structure well organised and ensure Google still recognises the key pages. I work for a travel company which needs to give customers various pieces of information on our website and this needs to be well organised in terms of structure. For example, customers need information on airport pick-ups and drop-offs for each of our destinations but this isn't something that needs to rank on Google. Logically for site structure would be to create a parent page: thedragontrip.com/transfers/india Is creating parent pages for unimportant content a bad idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicolewretham1 -
Change Google's version of Canonical link
Hi My website has millions of URLs and some of the URLs have duplicate versions. We did not set canonical all these years. Now we wanted to implement it and fix all the technical SEO issues. I wanted to consolidate and redirect all the variations of a URL to the highest pageview version and use that as the canonical because all of these variations have the same content. While doing this, I found in Google search console that Google has already selected another variation of URL as canonical and not the highest pageview version. My questions: I have millions of URLs for which I have to do 301 and set canonical. How can I find all the canonical URLs that Google has autoselected? Search Console has a daily quota of 100 or something. Is it possible to override Google's version of Canonical? Meaning, if I set a variation as Canonical and it is different than what Google has already selected, will it change overtime in Search Console? Should I just do a 301 to highest pageview variation of the URL and not set canonicals at all? This way the canonical that Google auto selected might get redirected to the highest pageview variation of the URL. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDCMarketing0 -
Google Seeing 301 as 404
Hi all, We recently migrated a few small sites into one larger site and generally we had no problems. We read a lot of blogs before hand, 301'd the old links etc and we've been keeping an eye on any 404s. What we have found is that Webmaster is picking up quite a few 404s, yet when we investigate these 404s they are 301'd and work fine. This isn't for every url, but Google is finding more and I just want to catch any problems before they get out of hand. Is there any reason why Google would count a 301 as a 404? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
301 Redirect? How to leverage the traffic on our old domain.
I've seen multiple questions about this but there's a few different answers on ways to approach it. Figured I'd personally ask for our situation. Any advice would be appreciated. We formed a new company with a new name / domain while at the same time buying an existing company in our industry. The domain and site of the company we acquired is ranking for some valuable keywords and still getting a significant amount of traffic (about half of what our new site is getting). A big downside has been, when they moved that site to a different server, something happened to where the site became uneducable so it's full of bad pricing and information. Because of that, we've had a maintenance page up for a little bit because it was generating calls to our sales team (GOOD) but the customer was having seen incredibly incorrect information (BAD) Rather than correcting those issues or figuring out why the site is un-editable, we just want to find a way where we can leverage that traffic and have them end up at our new site. Would we 301 redirect the entire domain to our new one? If we did that would the old domain still keep the majority of it's page rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HuskyCargo1 -
Why isn't google indexing our site?
Hi, We have majorly redesigned our site. Is is not a big site it is a SaaS site so has the typical structure, Landing, Features, Pricing, Sign Up, Contact Us etc... The main part of the site is after login so out of google's reach. Since the new release a month ago, google has indexed some pages, mainly the blog, which is brand new, it has reindexed a few of the original pages I am guessing this as if I click cached on a site: search it shows the new site. All new pages (of which there are 2) are totally missed. One is HTTP and one HTTPS, does HTTPS make a difference. I have submitted the site via webmaster tools and it says "URL and linked pages submitted to index" but a site: search doesn't bring all the pages? What is going on here please? What are we missing? We just want google to recognise the old site has gone and ALL the new site is here ready and waiting for it. Thanks Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
How to stop Google crawling after 301 redirect?
I have removed all pages from my old website and set 301 redirect to new website. But, I have verified old website with Google webmaster tools' HTML verification file which enable me to track all data and existence of pages in Google search for my old website. I was assumed that, Google will stop crawling and DE-indexed all pages after 301 redirect. Because, I have set 301 redirect before 3 months. Now, I'm able to see Google bot activity on my website with help of Google webmaster tools. You can find out attachment to know more about it. How can it possible & How Google can crawl removed pages? You can see following image to know more about it. First & Second
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0