Do I submit a sitemap for a highly dynamic site or not? If so, what's the best way to go about doing it?
-
I do SEO for online boutique marketplace. I've been here for about 4 weeks and no one's done there SEO (they've been around for about 5 years), so there's lots to do. A big concern is whether or not to submit a sitemap, and if I do submit one, what's the best way to go about doing one.
-
Like Bernadette already mentioned, it's very important as well for a dynamic site to have a sitemap. It will make sure that the pages that are new are submitted to Google faster then them finding out by themselves what kind of pages are new.
-
Welcome to Moz! It looks like the site has about 169,000 pages indexed Google currently. So, if that's the number of pages you have on your site, then they're crawling and indexing it just fine.
Since you did bring up the fact that you're dealing with dynamic pages, or dynamic URLs, it is important that you have a sitemap (probably multiple sitemaps) available so that Google can quickly crawl and have the proper URLs indexed.
You currently don't have a sitemap file here: https://jane.com/sitemap.xml which is where it should reside. I recommend also listing the sitemap file(s) in your robots.txt file here, as well: https://jane.com/robots.txt
Your site's web development team will need to auto generate the sitemap files, which currently isn't happening right now. I recommend having up to 50,000 URLs in each file, as it can get quite large if it's over that number. If you're able to generate the files based on certain criteria (such as main pages in the site, categories, or something else), then that would be helpful, as well.
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
-
What are the steps to submitting a sitemap for a blog?
We are in the process of a website migration and need to submit a site map for our website and blog. What are the steps to follow for submitting a site map for the blog? Can we submit with just the /blog URL or do we need to include each category?
Technical SEO | | Sable_Group0 -
What is the best way to deal with https?
Currently, the site I am working on is using HTTPS throughout the website. The non-HTTPS pages are redirected through a 301 redirect to the HTTPS- this happens for all pages. Is this the best strategy going forward? if not, what changes would you suggest?
Technical SEO | | adarsh880 -
Inconsistent page titles in SERP's
I encountered a strange phenomenon lately and I’d like to hear if you have any idea what’s causing it. For the past couple of weeks I’ve seen some our Google rankings getting unstable. While looking for a cause, I found that for some pages, Google results display another page title than the actual meta title of the page. Examples http://www.atexopleiding.nl Meta title: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring - Atexopleiding.nl Title in SERP: Atexopleiding.nl: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring http://www.reedbusinessopleidingen.nl/opleidingen/veiligheid/veiligheidskunde Meta title: Opleiding Veiligheidskunde, MBO & HBO - Reed Business Opleidingen Title in SERP: Veiligheidskunde - Reed Business Opleidingen http://www.pbna.com/vca-examens/ Meta title: Behaal uw VCA diploma bij de grootste van Nederland - PBNA Title in SERP: VCA Examens – PBNA I’ve looked in the source code, fetched some pages as Googlebot in WMT, but the title shown in the SERP doesn’t even exist in the source code. Now I suspect this might have something to do with the “cookiewall” implemented on our sites. Here’s why: Cookiewall was implemented end of January The problem didn’t exist until recently, though I can’t pinpoint an exact date. Problem exists on both rbo.nl, atexopleiding.nl & pbna.com, the latter running on Silverstripe CMS instead of WP. This rules out CMS specific causes. The image preview in the SERPS of many pages show the cookie alert overlay However, I’m not able to technically prove that the cookiescript causes this and I’d like to rule out other any obvious causes before I "blame it on the cookies" :). What do you think?
Technical SEO | | RBO0 -
Way to spider Wordpress site
I have an old Wordpress site and I want to move it to a new server and take it off Wordpress (too many hacks). I am trying to spider the site so as to get static, non-Wordpress, pages. I am having trouble doing this. When I spider the site, it changes the URLs. For instance, if the URL is www.domain.com/page/ the URL I get out of the spider is /page/index.html And those are not the URLs in the search engine indices. There are about 2000 pages on this site, so it is not feasible to set up 301 redirects. I tried using these spidering programs: WinHTTack Website Copier and PageNest Does anyone know of another method of turning a Wordpress site into a non Wordpress site?
Technical SEO | | DanCrean0 -
Best Way To Clean Up Unruly SubDomain?
Hi, I have several subdomains that present no real SEO value, but are being indexed. They don't earn any backlinks either. What's the best way of cleaning them up? I was thinking the following: 1. Verify them all in Webmaster Tools. 2. Remove all URLs from the index via the Removal Tool in WMT 3. Add site-wide no-index, follow directive. Also, to remove the URLs in WMT, you usually have to block the URLs via /robots.txt. If I'd like to keep Google crawling through the subdomains and remove their URLs, is there a way to do so?
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
What's best practice for blog meta titles?
I have the option of placing meta titles on the actual blog, or on the blog category on my site. Should I have separate meta titles for each blog or bundle them under a category and try to drive traffic to the category? Can anyone help with best practice?
Technical SEO | | Lubeman0 -
What would you do if a site's entire content is on a subdomain?
Scenario: There is a website called mydomain.com and it is a new domain with about 300 inbound links (some going to the product pages and categories), but they have some high trust links The website has categories a, b, c etc but they are all on a subdomain so instead of being mydomain.com/categoryA/productname the entire site's structure looks like subdomain.mydomain.com/categoryA/productname Would you go to the effort of 301ing the subdomain urls to the correct url structure of mydomain.com/category/product name, or would you leave it as it is? Just interested as to the extent of the issues this could cause in the future and if this is something worth resolving sooner than later.
Technical SEO | | Kerry220 -
Removing a site from Google's index
We have a site we'd like to have pulled from Google's index. Back in late June, we disallowed robot access to the site through the robots.txt file and added a robots meta tag with "no index,no follow" commands. The expectation was that Google would eventually crawl the site and remove it from the index in response to those tags. The problem is that Google hasn't come back to crawl the site since late May. Is there a way to speed up this process and communicate to Google that we want the entire site out of the index, or do we just have to wait until it's eventually crawled again?
Technical SEO | | issuebasedmedia0