Sitemap
-
I have a question for the links in a sitemap. Wordpress works with a sitemap that first link to the different kind of pages:
- pagesitemap.xml
- categorysitemap.xml
- productsitemap.xml
- etc. etc.
These links on the first page are clickable. We have a website that also links to the different pages but it's not clickable, just a flat link. Is this an issue?
-
Those links are made into hrefs (eg made clickable) by xml styling that's been applied. It's purely for user convenience - doesn't matter to search engines either way.
There is actually a massive benefit to having multiple sub-sitemaps like that though. Once you've submitted the sitemap index to Google Search Console, it will break out the crawling and indexing report for each sub-sitemap. Which means you will now be able to monitor and asses each of different sections of your site separately. Vastly easier to detect and fix crawl errors that way than when everything's lumped into a single sitemap.
Paul
-
This isn't an issue, and most sites don't provide clickable links to their sitemap/s.
I would recommend adding your sitemap URLs to Google's Search Console though, to help Google crawl your site more efficiently.
-
Hello,
WordPress has a habit of breaking sitemaps into categories, for me this is unnecessary as a normal sitemap can hold 50k of urls. In each of those categories is a smaller sitemap which is working as it should, if you are worried you can check the sitemap status in your search engine console - formal webmaster tools. One last fun one, there are two kinds of sitemap one for users and one for bots, the .xml kind is for bots if you were curious its not normal to click on a sitemap as seen here- https://moz.com/sitemap.xml (that is also directing to other sitemaps but thats per sides the point)
Hope that helps.
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
-
Sudden Drop in Indexed Pages and Images under Sitemap
Hello! Just a couple days back, realised that under the Google Webmaster Tool > Sitemap, my website www.bibliotek.co has a sudden drop in indexed pages and images. Previously, it was almost fully indexed. However, I checked and the Google Index > Index Status, it is still fully indexed Any reason why and how do I resolve? Any help is very much appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Bibliotek1230 -
My video sitemap is not being index by Google
Dear friends, I have a videos portal. I created a video sitemap.xml and submit in to GWT but after 20 days it has not been indexed. I have verified in bing webmaster as well. All videos are dynamically being fetched from server. My all static pages have been indexed but not videos. Please help me where am I doing the mistake. There are no separate pages for single videos. All the content is dynamically coming from server. Please help me. your answers will be more appreciated................. Thanks
Technical SEO | | docbeans0 -
Having Problems to Index all URLs on Sitemap
Hi all again ! Thanks in advance ! My client's site is having problems to index all its pages. I even bought the full extension of XML Sitemaps and the number of urls increased, but we still have problems to index all of them. What are the reasons? The robots.txt is open for all robots, we only prohibit users and spiders to enter our Intranet. I've read that duplicate content and 404's can be the reason. Anything else?
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Some URLs in the sitemap not indexed
Our company site has hundreds of thousands of pages. Yet no matter how big or small the total page count, I have found that the "URLs Indexed" in GWMT has never matched "URLS in Sitemap". When we were small and now that we have a LOT more pages, there is always a discrepancy of ~10% or so missing from the index. It's difficult to know which pages are not indexed, but I have found some that I can verify are in the Sitemap.xml file but not at all in the index. When I go to GWMT I can "Fetch and Render" missing pages fine - it's not as though it's blocked or inaccessible. Any ideas on why this is? Is this type of discrepancy typical?
Technical SEO | | Mase0 -
Redirecting old Sitemaps to a new XML
I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap? I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Adding multi-language sitemaps to robots.txt
I am working on a revamped multi-language site that has moved to Magento. Each language runs off the core coding so there are no sub-directories per language. The developer has created sitemaps which have been uploaded to their respective GWT accounts. They have placed the sitemaps in new directories such as: /sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml /sitemap/de/sitemap.xml I want to add the sitemaps to the robots.txt but can't figure out how to do it. Also should they have placed the sitemaps in a single location with the file identifying each language: /sitemap/uk-sitemap.xml /sitemap/de-sitemap.xml What is the cleanest way of handling these sitemaps and can/should I get them on robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Https vs http sitemap
I have a site that does a 301 redirect from http to https I currently have a sitemap auto submitted to google webmaster tools using the http pages. (because i didnt have https before) should I disable that sitemap for http and create one for the https only?
Technical SEO | | puremobile0 -
Does Bing support a news sitemap yet?
With Bing's new app that will integrate their news feed into Facebook, I'd like to optimize for inclusion in Bing news pickup. Does Bing accept news sitemaps yet?
Technical SEO | | Aggie0
