Sitemap Query
-
I've decided to write my own sitemap because frankly, the automated ones pull all kinds of out of I don't know where. So to get around that, manual it is. But I have some products appear in various categories, should I still list every product in each category in the sitemap, regardless of some being duplicates, or should I choose the most relevant category and list them there?
I do have a canonical URL extension which should resolve any duplicate content I have.
-
Hi,
It's ideal if your XML sitemap is an accurate representation of URLs you want indexed, i.e. the canonical versions. If you're using Screaming Frog to manually build your sitemaps, you make sure the 'Include Canonicals' button is unchecked. Doing so will trigger Screaming Frog to automatically leave out any URLs that canonicalize towards another URL, thus solving your problem.
-
If you have canonical you can put all the links, because in this way Google-Bot will crawl all the pages and see easier which have canonical and which is unique.
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
-
This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location error using pro-sitemaps.com
Hey, guys, We are using the pro-sitemaps.com tool to automate our sitemaps on our properties, but some of them give this error "This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location" for all the urls. Strange thing is that not all of them are with the error and most have all the urls indexed already. Do you have any experience with the tool and what is your opinion? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lgrozeva0 -
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Google News sitemap keywords
My company is a Theater news and reviews site. We're building a google news sitemap and Google suggests some recommended keywords we can use with their <keywords>tag: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/116037</keywords> Our writers also tag their stories with relevant keywords. What should we populate the <keywords>tag with?</keywords> We were thinking we'd automatically populate it with author-added tags, in addition to one or more of the recommended ones suggested by Google, such as Theater, Arts, and Culture (all of our articles are related to these topics). Finally, many of our articles are about say, celebrities. An author may tag an article with 'Bryan Cranston,' and when this is the case we're considering also tagging it with the 'Celebrities' tag. Are all or any of these worthwhile?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Submitting XML Sitemap for large website: how big?
Hi there, I’m currently researching how I can generate an XML sitemap for a large website we run. We think that Google is having problems indexing the URLs based on some of the messages we have been receiving in Webmaster tools, which also shows a large drop in the total number of indexed pages. Content on this site can be accessed in two ways. On the home page, the content appears as a list of posts. Users can search for previous posts and can search all the way back to the first posts that were submitted. Posts are also categorised using tags, and these tags can also currently be crawled by search engines. Users can then click on tags to see articles covering similar subjects. A post could have multiple tags (e.g. SEO, inbound marketing, Technical SEO) and so can be reached in multiple ways by users, creating a large number of URLs to index. Finally, my questions are: How big should a sitemap be? What proportion of the URLs of a website should it cover? What are the best tools for creating the sitemaps of large websites? How often should a sitemap be updated? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Internal followed links query
hi guys, im hoping to get some help with a a question i have about internal followed links. I analysed my site (selling adult toys) on open explorer today against some of my competitors. what i found my internal followed links and total internal links are extremely low compared to the other sites. here was my stats internal follwed links: 177 total internal links: 178 i have over 2000 pages on my website. which i believed to of had a good internal link structure. when compared to my competitors theres was in the thousands. i have looked to see if i could spot any 'no follow' tags but nothing. my site is christiarasextoys.co.uk if anyone can help me out here id really appreciate it
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | skyenicole0 -
Submitting URLs multiple times in different sitemaps
We have a very dynamic site, with a large number of pages. We use a sitemap index file, that points to several smaller sitemap files. The question is: Would there be any issue if we include the same URL in multiple sitemap files? Scenario: URL1 appears on sitemap1. 2 weeks later, the page at URL1 changes and we'd like to update it on a sitemap. Would it be acceptable to add URL1 as an entry in sitemap2? Would there be any issues with the same URL appearing multiple times? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | msquare0 -
Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?
For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
Sitemaps. When compressed do you use the .gz file format or the (untidy looking, IMHO) .xml.gz format?
When submitting compressed sitemaps to Google I normally use the a file named sitemap.gz A customer is banging on that his web guy says that sitemap.xml.gz is a better format. Google spiders sitemap.gz just fine and in Webmaster Tools everything looks OK... Interested to know other SEOmoz Pro's preferences here and also to check I haven't made an error that is going to bite me in the ass soon! Over to you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey0