Benefits to having an HTML sitemap?
-
We are currently migrating our site to a new CMS and in part of this migration I'm getting push-back from my development team regarding the HTML sitemap. We have a very large news site with 10s of thousands of pages. We currently have an HTML sitemap that greatly helps with distributing PR to article pages, but is not geared towards the user. The dev team doesn't see the benefit to recreating the HTML sitemap despite my assurance that we don't want to lose all these internal links since removing 1000s of links could have a negative impact on our Domain Authority.
Should I give in and concede the HTML sitemap since we have an XML one? Or am I right that we don't want to get rid of it?
-
It sure is, read the link i sent you, it explains why.
This is not a big job, and it is very important
-
Our html sitemap is broken down into different pages that never contain more than 250 links. All pages are linked via the top nav back to the homepage and to their section/subsection.
The issue I'm having is not that they don't know how to recreate our html sitemap in the new CMS. It's that they don't believe it serves a purpose. And given limited resources, they don't want to work on this in favor of other more crucial work.
My biggest concern is the removal of thousands of internal links. Should I be worried about this?
-
the xml and html sitemaps are completly different in what they do.
You dont want to have more then 250 links on a page, http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-too-many-hyperlinks
but 250 * 250 is 62500, so with one leverl you can get a lot of pages linked.
all the pages should be linked somehow, and all should link back to your home page and landing pages if posible.
I dont know your developers, but many CMS developers are limited by the capapabilities of the CMS, and expect the customer to bend to those limitations, i cant see why they would not do it if they have the ability.
Have a read of this page for a quick explaination of how Page rank flows.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
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
-
Sitemaps:
Hello, doing an audit found in our sitemaps the tag which at the time was to say that the url was mobile. In our case the URL is the same for desktop and mobile.
Technical SEO | | romaro
Do you recommend leaving or removing it?
Thank you!0 -
Google News Sitemap
Currently for our website Thinkdigit, we are using a rss sitemap (http://www.thinkdigit.com/google_sitemap/news_rss.php) for news. Please let me know is this the right format or we should use xml format only. Also we have lost a huge chunk of traffic from news search, Previously it used to be around 10,000 visit from google news, now it is just 300 visit per day.
Technical SEO | | 9dot90 -
Is there a way for me to automatically download a website's sitemap.xml every month?
From now on we want to store all our sitemap.xml over the next years. Its a nice archive to have that allows us to analyse how many pages we have on our website and which ones were removed/redirected. Any suggestions? Thanks
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0 -
Is there a suggested limit to the amount of links on a sitemap?
Currently, I have an error on my moz dashboard indicating there are too many links on one of my pages. That page is the sitemap. It was my understanding all internal pages should be linked to the sitemap. Can any mozzers help clarify the best practice here? Thanks, Clayton
Technical SEO | | JorgeUmana0 -
How can I find my Webmaster Tools HTML file?
So, totally amateur hour here, but I can't for the life of me find our HTML verification file for webmaster tools. I see nowhere to look at it in Google Webmaster Tools console, I tried a site:, I googled it, all the info out there is about how to verify a site. Ours is verified, but I need the verification file code to sync up with the Google API and no one seems to have it. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | healthgrades0 -
Different HTML based on resolution
Is it acceptable in terms of SEO to display different HTML based on a users resolution size? I feel I'm wasting space on my site catering for all the 1024 x 768ers
Technical SEO | | niallfred0 -
On-Site Sitemaps - Guidance Required
Hi, I am looking to find good examples of on-site sitemaps. We already submit our XML sitemap regularly through GWMT but I now wonder if we still need an on-site sitemap, as we have about 30 static pages and 300+ Wordpress blogs which in a sense makes that a spammy page as it has too many links and a higher than average keyword density. The reason I am looking for good examples is that I want to create a basic on-site sitemap that aids navigation but is styled to look ok as well. The Solution I have in mind: mydomain.com/link-example-one.php
Technical SEO | | tdsnet
mydomain.com/link-example-two.php
mydomain.com/liink-example-ten.php mydomain.com/blog then links to my 300 WP blogs, broken down into chunks navigated by using breadcrumbs. Will Google crawl this ok or should I stick to the current format listing ALL posts on one page? Thanks0 -
URL restructure and phasing out HTML sitemap
Hi SEOMozzies, Love the Q&A resource and already found lots of useful stuff too! I just started as an in-house SEO at a retailer and my first main challenge is to tidy up the complex URL structures and remove the ugly sub sitemap approach currently used. I already found a number of suggestions but it looks like I am dealing with a number of challenges that I need to resolve in a single release. So here is the current setup: The website is an ecommerce site (department store) with around 30k products. We are using multi select navigation (non Ajax). The main website uses a third party search engine to power the multi select navigation, that search engine has a very ugly URL structure. For example www.domain.tld/browse?location=1001/brand=100/color=575&size=1&various other params, or for multi select URL’s www.domain.tld/browse?location=1001/brand=100,104,506/color=575&size=1 &various other non used URL params. URL’s are easily up to 200 characters long and non-descriptive at all to our users. Many of these type of URL’s are indexed by search engines (we currently have 1.2 million of those URL’s indexed including session id’s and all other nasty URL params) Next to this the site is using a “sub site” that is sort of optimized for SEO, not 100% sure this is cloaking but it smells like it. It has a simplified navigation structure and better URL structure for products. Layout is similair to our main site but all complex HTMLelements like multi select, large top navigations menu's etc are all removed. Many of these links are indexed by search engines and rank higher than links from our main website. The URL structure is www.domain.tld/1/optimized-url .Currently 64.000 of these URL’s are indexed. We have links to this sub site in the footer of every page but a normal customer would never reach this site unless they come from organic search. Once a user lands on one of these pages we try to push him back to the main site as quickly as possible. My planned approach to improve this: 1.) Tidy up the URL structure in the main website (e.g. www.domain.tld/women/dresses and www.domain.tld/diesel-red-skirt-4563749. I plan to use Solution 2 as described in http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck to block multi select URL’s from being indexed and would like to use the URL param “location” as an indicator for search engines to ignore the link. A risk here is that all my currently indexed URL (1.2 million URL’s) will be blocked immediately after I put this live. I cannot redirect those URL’s to the optimized URL’s as the old URL’s should still be accessible. 2.) Remove the links to the sub site (www.domain.tld/1/optimized-url) from the footer and redirect (301) all those URL’s to the newly created SEO friendly product URL’s. URL’s that cannot be matched since there is no similar catalog location in the main website will be redirected (301) to our homepage. I wonder if this is a correct approach and if it would be better to do this in a phased way rather than the currently planned big bang? Any feedback would be highly appreciated, also let me know if things are not clear. Thanks! Chris
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO0