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
-
Indexing product attributes in sitemap
Hey Mozzers! I'm battling a few questions about the sitemap for my ecommerce store. Could you help me out? Is it necessary to include your product attributes in the sitemap? I'm not sure why it would matter to have a sitemap that lists everything in the color cherry. Also, if the attributes were included in the sitemap, would that count as duplicate content for the same products to show up in multiple attributes? Is there any benefit to submitting the sitemaps individually? For example, submitting /product-sitemap.xml, /product_brand-sitemap.xml versus just /sitemap.xml? Any other best practices for managing my ecommerce sitemap, or great resources, would be very helpful. Thank you! a1vUz
Technical SEO | | localwork0 -
Is there a limit to how many URLs you can put in a robots.txt file?
We have a site that has way too many urls caused by our crawlable faceted navigation. We are trying to purge 90% of our urls from the indexes. We put no index tags on the url combinations that we do no want indexed anymore, but it is taking google way too long to find the no index tags. Meanwhile we are getting hit with excessive url warnings and have been it by Panda. Would it help speed the process of purging urls if we added the urls to the robots.txt file? Could this cause any issues for us? Could it have the opposite effect and block the crawler from finding the urls, but not purge them from the index? The list could be in excess of 100MM urls.
Technical SEO | | kcb81780 -
Robots.txt on subdomains
Hi guys! I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?
Technical SEO | | Whittie0 -
Blocked jquery in Robots.txt, Any SEO impact?
I've heard that Google is now indexing links and stuff available in javascript and jquery. My webmastertools is showing that some links are blocked in robots.txt of jquery. Sorry I'm not a developer or designer. I want to know is there any impact of this on my SEO? and also how can I unblock it for the robots? Check this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/3VDWikC.png
Technical SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
Oh no googlebot can not access my robots.txt file
I just receive a n error message from google webmaster Wonder it was something to do with Yoast plugin. Could somebody help me with troubleshooting this? Here's original message Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 189 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%. Recommended action If the site error rate is 100%: Using a web browser, attempt to access http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt. If you are able to access it from your browser, then your site may be configured to deny access to googlebot. Check the configuration of your firewall and site to ensure that you are not denying access to googlebot. If your robots.txt is a static page, verify that your web service has proper permissions to access the file. If your robots.txt is dynamically generated, verify that the scripts that generate the robots.txt are properly configured and have permission to run. Check the logs for your website to see if your scripts are failing, and if so attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure. If the site error rate is less than 100%: Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors accessing robots.txt in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors. The most likely explanation is that your site is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss reconfiguring your web server or adding more resources to your website. After you think you've fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to fetch http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Robots.txt Sitemap with Relative Path
Hi Everyone, In robots.txt, can the sitemap be indicated with a relative path? I'm trying to roll out a robots file to ~200 websites, and they all have the same relative path for a sitemap but each is hosted on its own domain. Basically I'm trying to avoid needing to create 200 different robots.txt files just to change the domain. If I do need to do that, though, is there an easier way than just trudging through it?
Technical SEO | | MRCSearch0 -
Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?
Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | themegroup0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050