Should our social network put all of our member profiles in the site map?
-
We're working on some changes to our site and want to add a site map file to give some hints to search engines on our member profiles. Our site has millions of member profiles. I want to ensure that Google indexes them.
Is there a benefit to submitting millions of profiles across multiple site maps?
Is it better to pick a sample of those and submit them? Most member profiles have links to other member profiles.
Is there any benefit to taking a single site map of 50k links and then changing it at some frequency so that all of the member profiles are eventually indexed?
Thanks.
-
This was the approach we were considering. However, what gave me pause was looking at other social networks are doing.
- LinkedIn only has 50k profiles.
- Meez has multiple index files and looks like they are indexing many of their profiles
- Facebook and MySpace don't appear to use Sitemaps (although they do have a crawlable member directory)
- WeeWorld has 500 links
The point is there doesn't seem to be any consistency.
If we end up creating a human readable directory ala Facebook does that achieve the same thing?
-
Totally agree with mike and john.
-
I would definitely do this. Since you have so many profiles, you'll want to have one main sitemaps linking to smaller sitemaps with the profile URLs. One of the sites I work on has several million activities created by users that we put into sitemaps. We automatically generate our sitemaps files frequently and add the new activities created. We include a last modified date for each activity as well so the search bot will know if anything has changed since the last time it's indexed it.
I would create a sitemap system where all of your profiles could be found, and by including the last modified date, you can leave it up to the searchbot as to whether or not a profile has been updated and needs to be re-indexed. There are a couple other properties you could use listed on http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php as well.
-
Yes, we have the concept of public / private profiles. Private profiles aren't included in the index.
-
Benefiting or not, make sure users have the ability to turn this off to avoid privacy problems.
It might create a mess though if they link back and forth.
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
-
Old domain to new domain what happens to the old site?
Hello We rebranded 5 months ago, and set up a new domain for the new brand name which sits on different hosting to the old. We still have the old hosting running with the old site still on it. We have set up redirects to the new domain and wondered when/if we can turn off the old site hosting?
On-Page Optimization | | Scivisum0 -
Site has 302 redirects for HTTP to HTTPS when it should be 301
Hey all, In the latest Moz crawl, certain pages on our website have shown as having 302 redirects for the http to https, but not all. There should be a 301 solution, but wanted to see if anyone had any advice or guidance. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Julzseo
1 -
Do sites with more pages rank better?
If a site has more pages and also has good internal linking, then logically it would rank better. Is this the case? Should I be building big (but high quality) sites?
On-Page Optimization | | T0BY0 -
Social Media Profile and Website content dupe content issues ?
Is there a dupe content issue if your social media profiles and website have same content/copy ? For example if you have written great copy for your website home page then literally copy & paste that into your G+ co page introduction (since sums everything up perfectly and don't want to change it) would that have a negative effect or be perfectly ok ? cheers dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Site restructure question
Our site was deigned years ago to target customers in specific cities, now we've grown beyond this and I believe it is time to change the site structure.
On-Page Optimization | | PM_Academy
Ignore the 302 from the root page. Current structure: (assuming you've never been to our site before) projectmanagementacademy.net 302->/select-location.php /select-location.php -> /city-name/pmp-training.php This page was meant to be a "homepage" for each city, pointless page really /city-name/pmp-training.php -> /ciy-name/product-name.php These pages are for each individual product My suggested site structure: /city-name/pmp-training.php becomes projectmanagementacademy.net no more redirect /city-name/pmp-training.php gets removed and 301 to root page. /product-name.php each product's page and you would select a location when necessary (some products are online only) would 301 each /city-name/product-name to corresponding product page /product-name/city-name.php could add these pages if we still wanted the city name in url for city specific products My thoughts here are /product-name.php would receive a higher % of link juice because there are fewer page between 2 vs 4 if you came to the root page. and 2 vs 3 if you came from the select-location page. Also instead of being split between over 50 locations, all these would be together on one page. Your thoughts? Would this change improve our SERP for those product pages? Would we see a drop off in traffic if we did this? How long, if done correctly, would it take to see the recovery of rankings and traffic? Could we 301 /select-location.php to the root page? Thanks in advance for your insights to this. Any answer is a good answer. Trenton0 -
The correct way to go from PHP site to HTML site?
I have a website fully coded in PHP and I am doing a re-design over to an HTML site. I searched through the Q&A and there were some conflicting answers. Some said you will need to 301 all the pages. Others said to use the .htaccess to parse all the files as html. What is the correct way I should go about this? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | reliabox0 -
How Google differentiates web sites like directories?
Hi, I want to ask how google differentiates web sites like directories or company listing websites? How it understands that is a normal thing to have many links in a directory site? Are there some guides links about what to do and avoid and how to make SEO optimization for a directory web site.
On-Page Optimization | | vladokan0 -
Three Sites or One?
I have a client who provides three distinct, although related, services. Some of his competitors only provide one of those services, and thus their sites are more saturated with that particular service. Would it be best to develop three different sites optimized for each particular service, or could I achieve the same effect by optimizing different sections of one site for each service?
On-Page Optimization | | kscotbarr0