Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Hreflang in country specific XML Sitemaps?

Technical SEO

709

SimpleSearch Subscriber last edited by

Hello!

I'm rolling out hreflang tags in my client's "main" XML Sitemap.

My question is: do we need to implement these tags in the country level XML Sitemaps also?

Thanks!
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1
zeehj last edited by

Hey SimpleSearch–yes, you'll need to indicate these alternate URLs in your sitemap. Google claims that you can use hreflang or sitemaps to indicate international content, but I typically find that being thorough is best (you can always test whether your updated sitemap has made a difference through log file analysis before and after you execute this change).

Here is Google's writeup on indicating alternate pages via sitemap: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
Roman-Delcarmen last edited by

If you have different content/pages oriented for different regions, yes you need to implement
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Protecting sitemaps - Good idea or humbug?

Is there a way to protect your sitemap.xml so that only Google can read it and would it make sense to do this?
Technical SEO | | Roverandom

0
Canonical sitemap URL different to website URL architecture

Hi, This may or may not be be an issue, but would like some SEO advice from someone who has a deeper understanding. I'm currently working on a clients site that has a bespoke CMS built by another development agency. The website currently has a sitemap with one link - EG: www.example.com/category/page. This is obviously the page that is indexed in search engines. However the website structure uses www.example.com/page, this isn't indexed in search engines as the links are canonical. The client is also using the second URL structure in all it's off and online advertising, internal links and it's also been picked up by referral sites. I suspect this is not good practice... however I'd like to understand whether there are any negative SEO effectives from this structure? Does Google look at both pages with regard to visits, pageviews, bounce rate, etc. and combine the data OR just use the indexed version? www.example.com/category/page - 63.5% of total pageviews
www.example.com/page - 34.31% of total pageviews Thanks
Mike
Technical SEO | | MikeSutcliffe

0
Handling XML Sitemaps for Ad Classified Sites

Let's put on a scenario for a Job Classified site, So far the way we are handling xml sitemaps is in a consecutive number containing only ads historically: http://site.com/sitemap_ads_1.xml http://site.com/sitemap_ads_2.xml http://site.com/sitemap_ads_99.xml Those sitemaps are constantly updating as each ad is published, keeping expired ads but I'm sure there is a better way to handle them. For instance we have other source of content besides ads pages, like those related to search results (Careers, Location, Salary, level, type of contract, etc) and blog content, but we are not adding them yet So what I'm suggesting is to reduce the amount of xml sitemaps ads to just one, including just the ones that are active (not expired), add another xml sitemap based on search results, another one on blog content, another one on images and finally one for static content such as home, faq, contact, etc. Do you guys think this is the right way to go?
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ

0
Will it be possible to point diff sitemap to same robots.txt file.

Will it be possible to point diff sitemap to same robots.txt file.
Please advice.
Technical SEO | | nlogix

0
What may be the reason a sitemap is not indexed in Webmaster Tools?

Hi,
I have a problem with a client's website. I searched many related questions here about the same problem but couldn't figure out a solution. Their website is in 2 languages and they submitted 2 sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. One got 100% indexed. From the second one, from over 800 URLs only 32 are indexed. I checked the following hypothesis why the second sitemap may not get indexed: sitemap is wrongly formatted - False sitemap contains URLs that don't return 200 status - False, there are no URLs that return 404, 301 or 302 status codes sitemap contains URLs that are blocked by robots.txt - False internal duplicate content problems - False issues with meta canonical tags - False For clarification, URLs from the sitemap that is not indexed completely also don't show up in Google index. Can someone tell me what can I also check to fix this issue?
Technical SEO | | SorinaDascalu

0
Best practices for migrating an html sitemap? Or just get rid of it all together?

We are migrating a very large site to a new CMS and I'm trying to determine the best way to handle all the links (~15k) in our html sitemap. The developers don't see the purpose of using an html sitemap anymore and I have yet to come up with a good reason why we should migrate rather than just get rid of the sitemap since it is not very useful to users. The html sitemap was created about 6 years ago when page rank sculpting was a high priority. Currently, since we already have an XML sitemap, I'm not sure that there's really a need for a html sitemap, other than to maintain all the internal links. How valuable are the internal links found in an html sitemap? And will it be a problem if we remove these from our link profile? 15,000 links sounds significant, but they only account for less than .5% of our internal links. What do all you think?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright

0
Blocking URL's with specific parameters from Googlebot

Hi, I've discovered that Googlebot's are voting on products listed on our website and as a result are creating negative ratings by placing votes from 1 to 5 for every product. The voting function is handled using Javascript, as shown below, and the script prevents multiple votes so most products end up with a vote of 1, which translates to "poor". How do I go about using robots.txt to block a URL with specific parameters only? I'm worried that I might end up blocking the whole product listing, which would result in de-listing from Google and the loss of many highly ranked pages. DON'T want to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?productid=1234 WANT to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?mode=vote&productid=1234&vote=2 Javacript button code: onclick="javascript: document.voteform.submit();" Thanks in advance for any advice given. Regards,
Asim
Technical SEO | | aethereal

0
Sitemap with References to Second Domain

I have just discovered a client site that is serving content from a single database into two separate domains and has created xml sitemaps which contain references to both domains in an attempt to avoid being tagged for duplicate content. I always thought that a sitemap was intended to show the files inside a single domain and the idea of multiple domains in the sitemap had never occurred to me... The sites are both very large storefronts and one of them (the larger of the two) has recently seen a 50% drop in search traffic and loss of some 600 search terms from top 50 positions in Google. My first instinct is that the sitemaps should be altered to only show files within each domain, but am worried about causing further loss of traffic. Is it possible that the inclusion URLs for the second domain in the sitemap may in fact be signalling duplicate content to Search Engines? Does anyone have a definitive view of whether these sitemaps are good, bad or irrelevant?
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz

0