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.
Resubmit sitemaps on every change?
-
Hello Mozers,
Our sitemaps were submitted to Google and Bing, and are successfully indexed. Every time pages are added to our store (ecommerce), we re-generate the xml sitemap.
My question is: should we be resubmitting the sitemaps every time their content change, or since they were submitted once can we assume that the crawlers will re-download the sitemaps by themselves (I don't like to assume).
What are best practices here?
Thanks!
-
Great follow up! Thanks for that. :^)
-
For anybody that is interested in knowing, after 10 days of webmaster monitoring, here are our conclusions:
We have 2 sitemaps (2 languages). It took a few days for Google to re-download the mains sitemap, and a few more days to download the secondary sitemap, however, the new sitemaps were both picked up by Google with no intervention on our part.
Bing, however, has still no downloaded either of the updated sitemaps.
Because it's so easy and isn't seen as bad practice, we will be manually re-submitting sitemap updated to both search engines.
Thanks!
-
Ryan gave an excellent answer. Google is using other clues to pick up on new pages I'm not saying don't submit your sitemap I'm just saying add structured data/schema into your store as well. Check your crawl budget and see if your site is eating up too much of it and not being indexed properly by Google.
A simple test to see if something is being blocked is to run your site through https://varvy.com/
If you do not know, I would stress using Deep Crawl or screaming frog SEO spider
Navigation Is often one of many can cause problems where your site will not be crawled correctly.
To determine whether or not you have to crawl budget issue we got each can make independent image sitemaps and index sitemaps as well just to be sure that Google is getting what you want to.
Like Ryan said check out
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669
Here is a Magento dynamic site map http://i.imgur.com/QKS0bgU.png
validate your sitemap check it for problems
http://tools.seochat.com/tools/site-validator/
https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data
http://www.searchmetrics.com/news-and-events/schema-org-in-google-search-results/
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-for-marketplaces-ecommerce/
JSON-LD Microdata
https://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/#json
I hope this helps,
Thomas
-
Hello. You can check the Submitted vs Indexed count within Search Console to see whether or not your regenerated sitemap is being picked up already, but resubmitting a sitemap isn't an issue, and fairly easy to do, per Google:
Resubmit your sitemap
- Open the Sitemaps report
- Select the sitemap(s) you want to resubmit from the table
- Click the Resubmit sitemap button.
You can also resubmit a sitemap by sending an HTTP GET request to the following URL, specifying your own sitemap URL: http://google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/my_sitemap.xml
Via: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669 Also from a FAQ in the Webmasters blog they state that, "Google does not penalize you for submitting a Sitemap."
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
-
Sitemap.xml strategy for site with thousands of pages
I have a client that has a HUGE website with thousands of product pages. We don't currently have a sitemap.xml because it would take so much power to map the sitemap. I have thought about creating a sitemap for the key pages on the website - but didn't want to hurt the SEO on the thousands of product pages. If you have a sitemap.xml that only has some of the pages on your site - will it negatively impact the other pages, that Google has indexed - but are not listed on the sitemap.xml.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
Huge drop in rankins, traffic and impressions after changing to CloudFlare
Hi there, In October, one of our customer's programmer made a change on their website to optimize its loading speed. Since then, the all the SEO's metrics has dropped. Apparently, the change was to move to CloudFlare and to add Gzip compression. I was talking with the programmer and he told me he had no idea why that happened. Now comes 5 months later and the SEO metrics havn't come back yet. What seems so wierd is that two keywords in particular had the most massive drop. Those two keywords were the top keywords (more than 1k of impressions a month) and now its like there is no impressions or clics at all. Did anyone had the same event occur to them? Do you have any idea what could help this case?
Technical SEO | | H.M.N.0 -
Include or exclude noindex urls in sitemap?
We just added tags to our pages with thin content. Should we include or exclude those urls from our sitemap.xml file? I've read conflicting recommendations.
Technical SEO | | vcj0 -
Is sitemap required on my robots.txt?
Hi, I know that linking your sitemap from your robots.txt file is a good practice. Ok, but... may I just send my sitemap to search console and forget about adding ti to my robots.txt? That's my situation: 1 multilang platform which means... ... 2 set of pages. One for each lang, of course But my CMS (magento) only allows me to have 1 robots.txt file So, again: may I have a robots.txt file woth no sitemap AND not suffering any potential SEO loss? Thanks in advance, Juan Vicente Mañanas Abad
Technical SEO | | Webicultors0 -
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 -
Which Sitemap to keep - Http or https (or both)
Hi, Just finished upgrading my site to the ssl version (like so many other webmasters now that it may be a ranking factor). FIxed all links, CDN links are now secure, etc and 301 Redirected all pages from http to https. Changed property in Google Analytics from http to https and added https version in Webmaster Tools. So far, so good. Now the question is should I add the https version of the sitemap in the new HTTPS site in webmasters or retain the existing http one? Ideally switching over completely to https version by adding a new sitemap would make more sense as the http version of the sitemap would anyways now be re-directed to HTTPS. But the last thing i can is to get penalized for duplicate content. Could you please suggest as I am still a rookie in this department. If I should add the https sitemap version in the new site, should i delete the old http one or no harm retaining it.
Technical SEO | | ashishb010 -
Host sitemaps on S3?
Hey guys, I run a dynamic web service and I will start building static sitemaps for it pretty soon. The fact that my app lives in a multitude of servers doesn't make it easy to distribute frequently updated static files throughout the servers. My idea was to host the files in AWS S3 and point my robots.txt sitemap directive there. I'll use a sitemap index so, every other sitemap will be hosted on S3 as well. I could dynamically mirror the content from the files in S3 through my app, but that would be a little more resource intensive than just serving the static files from a common place. Any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tanlup0 -
XML Sitemap without PHP
Is it possible to generate an XML sitemap for a site without PHP? If so, how?
Technical SEO | | jeffreytrull11