Sitemap Best Practices

[moon-boots]

My question is regarding the URL structure best practices of a sitemap. My website allows search any number of ways, i.e.

1. http://www.website.com/category/subcategory/product

2. http://www.website.com/subcategory/product

3. http://www.website.com/product

However, I am not sure which structure to use in the sitemap (which is being written manually). I know that for SEO purposes the 3rd option is best as the link is more relevant to that individual product, but the Moz tool states that the home page should have less than 100 links (although Google doesn't penalise for having more) and by writing my entire site in the 3rd way it would result in a lot more links adjoining to the home page.

It is either the 2nd or 3rd option, I think, as the 1st category is not keyword specific (rather a generic term, i.e. novelties).

Does anyone have experience with this?

[LoganRay]

Happy to help!

[moon-boots]

Thanks Logan!

[LoganRay]

Google is less concerned about the actual structure of your URLs, and more concerned that you pick a horse and ride it, which you've done by canonicalizing 2 variations to the third. In your example, the third URL is perfectly fine, since it will always remain constant. The other 2 can change depending on how someone navigates to that product. I'd keep it the way you have it.

[moon-boots]

Hello Logan, thanks for responding, although you've not responded to my actual question as such.

Yes, currently I am canonicalising links 1 and 2 toward link 3, but my question wasn't regarding which URL to use in the sitemap, but rather what Googles preferred URL structure was.

Does Google dislike the link 3 structure because it makes it links every product and category directly to the home page? It would appear that the Moz tool seems to think so (although they state that you're not penalised for it).

In your experience, what is Googles preferred URL structure, link 1, 2 or 3? I can easily change the Canonical tag to either of the three, that isn't an issue.

[LoganRay]

Hi,

In your example, you have 3 URLs that render the same content it sounds like. If this is the case, I would assume you're canonicalizing 2 versions to the third. In this situation, you'd want to use the canonical version in your XML sitemaps. You don't want to point search engines to URLs in a XML sitemap then have them go elsewhere when they find the canonical tag.