Hi Dmitrii,

Thanks for your reply. At first, I also thought that using multiple domains in one sitemap was not possible, however I came across this article from Google that mentions this possibility:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en

Does anyone have experience with this?

Hi everyone,

I've been searching about a problem, but haven't been able to find an answer.

We would like to generate a XML site map for an international web shop. This shop has one domain for Dutch visitors (.nl) and another domain for visitors of other countries (Germany, France, Belgium etc.) (.com). The website on the 2 domains looks the same, has the same template and same pages, but as it is targeted to other countries, the pages are in different languages and the urls are also in different languages (see example below for a category bags).

Example Netherlands:
Dutch domain: www.client.nl 
Example Dutch bags category page: www.client.nl/tassen

Example France:
International domain: www.client.com 
Example French bags category page: www.client.com/sacs

When a visitor is on the Dutch domain (.nl) which shows the Dutch content, he can switch country to for example France in the country switch and then gets redirected to the other, international .com domain. Also the other way round.

Now we want to generate a XML sitemap for these 2 domains. As it is the same site, but on 2 domains, development wants to make 1 sitemap, where we take the Dutch version with Dutch domain as basis and in the alternates we specify the other language versions on the other domain (see example below).

<loc>http://www.client.nl/tassen</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="http://www.client.com/sacs"
/></xhtml:link<br>

Is this the best way to do this? Or would we need to make 2 site maps, as it are 2 domains?

There is certainly a need to communicate that the products are made of leather. We want to be found when people search for leather billfolds, and I feel it's only natural that we also communicate this on the website. Especially since not everyone knows the brand, and since leather is not in the company name.

I guess the answer to your question is "nothing", at least when it comes to category names. However, would you go as far as to also use it in product names? This would mean that on a category page, you would see a list of products (18 on each page at the moment), all with leather in the name.

In a recent WBF about over optimization, Cyrus said it seemed that especially the combination of the title tag, URL and incoming anchor text seemed to trigger a decrease in rankings. I'm not too worried about that happening here, I think we can safely optimize both title tags and URL's at least. Now to decide what to do with the rest.

This may be a very basic question, but with all this talk about overoptimization I just want to make sure we get this right.

We run a webshop for a manufacturer of leather products. Billfolds, iPhone sleeves, briefcases etc. Their company name (also the domain name at which the webshop is active) does not include 'leather'.

Obviously, leather is an important keyword for these products, but having a category page with 'leather X', 'leather Y', 'leather Z' not only looks weird, it might even look spammy. The same, though to a lesser extent, is true for the category names. Do we really want to have 'leather billfolds', 'leather ipad sleeves' etc. at the top of every category?

Can anyone give some tips, pointers, best practices perhaps for when an important keyword is basically true for every category/product/page of your site? How do you include it without overoptimizing?