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To clarify

Example situation

Current Site Taxonomy

1. Section: Men's
2. Category: T-Shirt
3. Sub-Category: Long Sleeve

New Site taxonomy:

1. Section: Men's
2. Category: Shirts
3. Sub-Category: T-Shirts

In new taxonomy the following is happening:

• T-Shirts is being demoted to a sub-category
• Long Sleeve is going away
• Shirts is becoming a brand new category

So, do I just put in a redirect from the old t-shirt page to the new (demoted) t-shirt page? The old one has built up value so I wasnt sure. But more importantly do I need to redirect every single navigational URL for the old URL's and redirect them to a new page? It seems a bit unnecessary.

Need some advice on when to use canonical vs. redirects for navigation changes to a website. However, if there are other options i am open to them as well.

• We are consolidating some navigational paths and moving others
• We are renaming product pages (therefore creating new product pages, CMS platform requirements)
• Keep in mind we have desktop domain and a mobile domain

Questions

• Do we redirect old URL's to the new product page URL's?
• Do we redirect old mobile URL's to new mobile URL's or to the desktop equivalent?
• Do we redirect all old product page URL's containing navigation elements to the new product page URL?
• If we have a category page being added to two different sections how do we determine the right canonical URL? (the URL will be different because the customer paths will be different)
• Do we need to make sure and redirect all old URL's to a new URL? If so, what is the best way to find all of the URL's?

I have seen many instructions but I am still uncertain. Here is the situation

We will be implementing rel prev rel next on our paginted pages.

The question is:

• Do we implement self referencing canonical URL on the main page and each paginated page?
• Do we implement noindex/follow meta robots tag on each paginated page?
• Do we include the canonical URL for each paginated page in the sitemap if we do not add the meta robots tag?
• We have a view all but will not be using it due to page load capabilities...what do we do with the viewl all URL? Do we add meta robots to it?
• For website search results pages containing pagination should we just put a noindex/follow meta robots tag on them?
• We have seperate mobile URL's that also contain pagination. Do we need to consider these pages as a seperate pagination project? We already canonical all the mobile URL's to the main page of the desktop URL.

Thanks!

Hi Thomas,

Definitely comforting to hear that you ran your site with an incomplete sitemap without seeing any negative results. Like I said in my response above, I think we will proceed with the partial sitemap, just to have one on there, and then upload a complete one once we can clean up the site a little more. Thanks for your insights - they were very helpful!

Hi Saijo,

Thanks for your recommendations! We do want to place a little more emphasis on our top level and main navigation pages, so I think we will probably proceed with a preliminary sitemap with just those pages for now. Once we get to that point, we'll definitely be needing to use multiple sitemaps and an index - thanks for pointing this out!

Hi all,

We are working on an extremely large retail site with some major duplicate content issues that we are  in the process of remedying. The site also does not currently have an XML sitemap.

Would it be advisable to create a small XML sitemap with only the main category pages for the time being, and then after our duplicate content issues are resolved, uploading the complete sitemap? Or should we wait to upload anything until all work is complete down to the product page level and canonicals are in place? Will uploading a incomplete sitemap be fraudulent or misleading in the eyes of the search engines and prompt a penalty, or would having at least the main pages mapped while we continue work be okay?

Please let me know if more info is needed to answer! Thanks in advance!