Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Sitemap.xml strategy for site with thousands of pages
-
I have a client that has a HUGE website with thousands of product pages. We don't currently have a sitemap.xml because it would take so much power to map the sitemap. I have thought about creating a sitemap for the key pages on the website - but didn't want to hurt the SEO on the thousands of product pages. If you have a sitemap.xml that only has some of the pages on your site - will it negatively impact the other pages, that Google has indexed - but are not listed on the sitemap.xml.
-
@jerrico1 Only including some pages in the sitemap won't hurt your SEO performance at all. I've done this on a number of sites for exactly the same reasons you are facing.
The XML sitemap simply gives Google one more way to find your pages. Ideally, you could use it to give Google a way to find all of your pages but you want to at least use it for the pages you want to be sure Google finds. However, there is no penalty if the page isn't in the sitemap.
That said - you may want to check if you need the XML sitemap at all as a point of discovery. If you have lots of links (internal or external) to the pages on your website, then odds are good that Google is already finding those pages. The XML sitemap wouldn't hurt to have but if there already links to these pages, you likely don't have a big problem to solve here.
The best way to check this is within your log file - pull a unique list of all the URLs that Google has crawled over the last few weeks. You may not be able to open up your log files (sometimes you can't easily on large sites and you aren't using an enterprise log analyzer). If that is the case, then you could check to see how many of your pages are Google organic landing pages in your analytics tool--if the page is getting traffic from Google, then Google clearly found the page.
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
-
If I'm using a compressed sitemap (sitemap.xml.gz) that's the URL that gets submitted to webmaster tools, correct?
I just want to verify that if a compressed sitemap file is being used, then the URL that gets submitted to Google, Bing, etc and the URL that's used in the robots.txt indicates that it's a compressed file. For example, "sitemap.xml.gz" -- thanks!
Technical SEO | | jgresalfi0 -
Removing a large number of unnecessary pages from a site
Hi all, I got a big problem with my website. I have a lot of page, duplicate page made from various combinations of selects, and for all this duplicate content we've be hit by a panda update 2 years ago. I don't want to bring new content an all of these pages, about 3.000.000, because most of them are unnecessary. Google indexed all of them (3.000.000), and I want to redirect the pages that I don't need anymore to the most important ones. My question, is there any problem in how google will see this change, because after this it will remain only 5000-6000 relevant pages?
Technical SEO | | Silviu0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png
Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI0 -
How to generate a visual sitemap using sitemap.xml
Are there any tools (online preferably) which will take a sitemap.xml file and generate a visual site map? Seems like an obvious thing to do, but can't find any simple tools for this?
Technical SEO | | k3nn3dy30 -
Should XML sitemaps include *all* pages or just the deeper ones?
Hi guys, Ok this is a bit of a sitemap 101 question but I cant find a definitive answer: When we're running out XML sitemaps for google to chew on (we're talking ecommerce and directory sites with many pages inside sub-categories here) is there any point in mentioning the homepage or even the second level pages? We know google is crawling and indexing those and we're thinking we should trim the fat and just send a map of the bottom level pages. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | timwills0 -
What's the difference between a category page and a content page
Hello, Little confused on this matter. From a website architectural and content stand point, what is the difference between a category page and a content page? So lets say I was going to build a website around tea. My home page would be about tea. My category pages would be: White Tea, Black Tea, Oolong Team and British Tea correct? ( I Would write content for each of these topics on their respective category pages correct?) Then suppose I wrote articles on organic white tea, white tea recipes, how to brew white team etc...( Are these content pages?) Do I think link FROM my category page ( White Tea) to my ( Content pages ie; Organic White Tea, white tea receipes etc) or do I link from my content page to my category page? I hope this makes sense. Thanks, Bill
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0
