Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Frederico,

On the google Sitemaps Errors help page, they include the following information:

"You should also check that the URLs all begin with the same domain as your Sitemap location. For instance, if your Sitemap is listed under http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml, the following URLs are not valid for that Sitemap:

• http://www.google.com — it's in the google.com domain rather than the example.com domain
• http://example.com/ — it's missing the initial www
• www.example.com/ — it's missing the protocol (http), and will generate an Invalid URL warning
• https://www.example.com/ — it's using a different protocol (https rather than http)

Any URLs in the Sitemap that are not denied are processed normally."

This leads me to understand that Google don't want you to put http urls in an https sitemap and also vice-versa. What makes you believe otherwise??

Hoping to get to the bottom of this - thanks for the ongoing feedback

Thanks for the input Frederico. I've been receiving various different answers to this question.

Most responses have said that we should submit 2 sitemaps: 1 sitemap listed under http that only includes the http pages of the site (which means we wouldn't include our homepage since it's under https!!!).

And 1 sitemap listed on the https version which only includes the https pages (which is only 2 pages!).

To be honest, I still don't know what to do here. Really frustrating that there is no clear cut answer to our situation, which I can't believe is even that unique.

Hey Federico,

Thanks again for the insight - much appreciated.

So there's no problem for us to create a sitemap that has the https homepage and then the rest of the pages in http? From reading previous Q&As on this topic it seems as though people felt you shouldn't have https and http pages under the same sitemap - I am a novice here so that's why I'm just looking for advice.

Is there any reason why we would need to have the two sitemaps available - as in, why wouldn't we just remove the old http sitemap (that didn't include the https homepage) and just go with the https homepage sitemap?

I just wanted to make sure I understood your response before we take action.

Cheers,

-G

Hi guys,

Trying to figure out some onsite issues I've been having. Would appreciate any feedback on the following 2 questions:

My homepage (http://mysite.com) is a 301 redirect to https://mysite.com, which is under SSL. Only 2 pages of my site are https, the rest are http.

1. Should the directory of my sitemap be https://mysite.com/sitemap.xml or should it be kept with http (even though the redirected homepage is to https)?

2. Should my sitemap include the https pages (only 2 pages) as well as the http?

Thanks,

G

Hi Federico,

Thanks for taking the time to check out the site. I understand that there are hundreds of factors that come into play when looking at search ranking. It's just frustrating that we've pretty much followed all the instructions laid out on SEO Moz but don't seem to be getting the results - the only reason I can see why this might be is because of something related to our homepage under SSL (the redirect, the sitemap, or something simple missing in the structure).

I have analyzed our competitors and I cannot see why we are not getting improvements compared to what they are doing.

When choosing an SEO professional, how can we be sure that they will be able to diagnose the issue we are having as nobody so far has been able to pinpoint the issue?

-G

Hi Fredico,

In addition to my last response to your comment, I've attached the Moz results for the page I am referring to. We are currently ranked number 8, and I have no idea why we wouldn't be ahead of the competitors in slot number 3, 4, or 5 (considering we have a higher on page SEO grading than them too).

Again, these all just point to the fact that we might have some basic technical issue with the 301 redirect that is stopping some juice or properly reading of our page.

-G

5

Hi Federico,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Here's a link to the homepage of the site where we have the 301 redirect to https: http://goo.gl/qpGPFa

I have a feeling that we are not doing something correctly with regards to the robots.txt file or with our sitemap that is resulting on Google having to index the https and the http parts of our site individually.

Regardless, any advice/input you might have on why you think our rankings are not increasing would be greatly appreciated (we have higher Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Backlinks than one of our competitors ranked who is higher!)

-G

Hi Moz Community,

In July, we changed our homepage to https via a 301 redirect from http (the only page on our site with https).

Our homepage receives an A grade in the ‘On Page Grader’ by Moz for our desired keyword.

We have increased our backlink efforts directly to our homepage since we switched to the SSL homepage. However, we still have not increased in search ranking for our specific keyword.

Is there something we could have missed when doing the 301 redirect (submitting a new sitemap, changing rotbots.txt files, or anything else??) that has resulted in Google not correctly accessing the https version?  (the https page has been indexed by Google).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for taking a look anyway Chris.

Does anybody else have any suggestions on what might be going on here?

Cheers,

Greg

Hey Chris,

Yeah - not sure why it ended up being displayed like that. Here's a screen shot of it again (this is the Google Fetch result that we receive when we Google Fetch on our http homepage - in our main webmaster account): http://tinypic.com/r/2vnkz9h/5

5