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.
2 sitemaps on my robots.txt?
-
Hi,
I thought that I just could link one sitemap from my site's robots.txt but... I may be wrong.
So, I need to confirm if this kind of implementation is right or wrong:
robots.txt for Magento Community and Enterprise
...
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.es/media/sitemap/es.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.pt/media/sitemap/pt.xmlThanks in advance,
-
We recently changed our protocol to https
We have in our robots.txt our new https sitemap link
Our agency is recommending we add another sitemap in our robots.txt file to our insecure sitemap - while google is reindexing our secure protocol. They recommend this as a way for all SEs to pick up on 301 redirects and swap out unsecured results in the index more efficiently.
Do you agree with this?
I am in the camp that we should have have our https sitemap and google will figure it out and having 2 sitemaps one to our old http and one to our new https in our robots.txt is redundant and may be viewed as duplicate content, not as a positive of helping SEs to see 301s better to reindex secure links.
Whats your thought? Let me know if I need to explain more.
-
Well if both sitemaps are for same site then it's OK. But it's much better to implement hreflang as this is explained here:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en
I'm not sure that Magento can do this but you always can hire 3rd party dev for building plugin/module for this.
-
ok, just one detail: these domains are for a multilang site.
I mean, both have quite the same content: one in spanish and the other un portuguese.
Thanks a lot.
-
You can also have multiple sitemaps on 3rd sites. Look at Moz robots.txt:
Sitemap: https://moz.com/blog-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://moz.com/ugc-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://moz.com/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://d2eeipcrcdle6.cloudfront.net/past-videos.xml
Sitemap: http://app.wistia.com/sitemaps/36357.xmlAlso Google.com robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/culturalinstitute/sitemaps/www_google_com_culturalinstitute/sitemap-index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sitemaps/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/earth/gallery/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/trends/websites/sitemaps/sitemapindex.xml
Sitemap: https://www.google.com/sitemap.xmlAlso Bing.com robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://cn.bing.com/dict/sitemap-index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.bing.com/offers/sitemap.xmlSo using multiple sitemaps it's OK and they can be also hosted on 3rd party server.
-
Hello,
Yes, multiple sitemaps are okay, and sometimes even advised!
You can read Google's official response here."..it's fine for multiple Sitemaps to live in the same directory (as many as you want!)..."
And you can see a case study showing how multiple sitemaps has helped traffic here on Moz.
Hope this helps,
Don
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
-
Robots.txt allows wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Hello, Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin
I noticed something peculiar in the robots.txt used by one of my clients: Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php What would be the purpose of allowing a search engine to crawl this file?
Is it OK? Should I do something about it?
Everything else on /wp-admin/ is disallowed.
Thanks in advance for your help.
-AK:2 -
Upgrade old sitemap to a new sitemap index. How to do without danger ?
Hi MOZ users and friends. I have a website that have a php template developed by ourselves, and a wordpress blog in /blog/ subdirectory. Actually we have a sitemap.xml file in the root domain where are all the subsections and blog's posts. We upgrade manually the sitemap, once a month, adding the new posts created in the blog. I want to automate this process , so i created a sitemap index with two sitemaps inside it. One is the old sitemap without the blog's posts and a new one created with "Google XML Sitemap" wordpress plugin, inside the /blog/ subdirectory. That is, in the sitemap_index.xml file i have: Domain.com/sitemap.xml (old sitemap after remove blog posts urls) Domain.com/blog/sitemap.xml (auto-updatable sitemap create with Google XML plugin) Now i have to submit this sitemap index to Google Search Console, but i want to be completely sure about how to do this. I think that the only that i have to do is delete the old sitemap on Search Console and upload the new sitemap index, is it ok ?
Technical SEO | | ClaudioHeilborn0 -
Remove sitemap, effect ranking?
We are considering to remove our sitemap because it doesn't display the right structure. Will it affect current rankings if we remove the sitemap en continuing without a sitemap? Thanks
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry0400 -
2 Versions of Same Homepage
We want to show new and returning visitors different versions of our homepage (same URL) What, if anything, should we use as the markup to tell Google what we are doing?
Technical SEO | | theLotter
Any danger that Google will think we are cloaking? Thanks!0 -
Googlebot does not obey robots.txt disallow
Hi Mozzers! We are trying to get Googlebot to steer away from our internal search results pages by adding a parameter "nocrawl=1" to facet/filter links and then robots.txt disallow all URLs containing that parameter. We implemented this late august and since that, the GWMT message "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site", stopped coming. But today we received yet another. The weird thing is that Google gives many of our nowadays robots.txt disallowed URLs as examples of URLs that may cause us problems. What could be the reason? Best regards, Martin
Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Invisible robots.txt?
So here's a weird one... Client comes to me for some simple changes, turns out there are some major issues with the site, one of which is that none of the correct content pages are showing up in Google, just ancillary (outdated) ones. Looks like an issue because even the main homepage isn't showing up with a "site:domain.com" So, I add to Webmaster Tools and, after an hour or so, I get the red bar of doom, "robots.txt is blocking important pages." I check it out in Webmasters and, sure enough, it's a "User agent: * Disallow /" ACK! But wait... there's no robots.txt to be found on the server. I can go to domain.com/robots.txt and see it but nothing via FTP. I upload a new one and, thankfully, that is now showing but I've never seen that before. Question is: can a robots.txt file be stored in a way that can't be seen? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | joshcanhelp0 -
/index.php in sitemap? take it out?
Hi Everyone, The following was automatically generated at xml-sitemaps.com Should I get rid of the index.php url from my sitemap? If so, how do I go about redirecting it in my htaccess ? <url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/</loc></url>
Technical SEO | | RogersSEO
<url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/index.php</loc></url> thank you in advance, Martin0