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.
Is it bad to have same page listed twice in sitemap?
-
Hello,
I have found that from an HTML (not xml) sitemap of a website, a page has been listed twice. Is it okay or will it be considered duplicate content?
Both the links use same anchor text, but different urls that redirect to another (final) page. I thought ideal way is to use final page in sitemap (and in all internal linking), not the intermediate pages. Am I right?
-
I had it happen in a sitemap I submitted to Google in my Webmaster tools and it didn't like it. So I removed it and resubmitted it.
-
I think the other filled in all the details. But simply put:
XML sitemap? Yes, it will generate an error/warning in the Dashboard console.
HTML sitemap? No, as long as it is listed for better navigation and not keyword loading.
-
Firstly, do you mean a HTML sitemap (i.e. a sitemap page on a website) or an XML sitemap (one that is submitted to Google/Bing for indexing)?
If both links go to the same page, then it's not duplicate content. Duplicate content is the same stuff on different URLs.
If an internal sitemap has two links redirecting to one end page then this is highly inefficient and the links should point directly to the end page.
That being the case, then only one link is really needed.
If... after all that you meant an XML sitemap, then it's not duplicate content to have it listed twice, but it should be only listed once in this case.
-
If it's a sitemap for the users and the page appears under 2 different categories, it's okay. Think usability here.
However, if/when it's the XML sitemap, it should only be there once.
As for the intermediary pages, If I were you, if they offer a good purpose (the reason you have those pages in the 1st place), they should then be listed in both the XML and HTML sitemaps if they help the users.
So to answer your question more directly, if your question is:
Is it bad to have same page listed twice in XML sitemap? Yes, it will generate an error/warning in webmaster console.
Is it bad to have same page listed twice in HTML sitemap? No, if that's what is needed for users, it's okay.
I 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
-
Customer Reviews on Product Page / Pagination / Crawl 3 review pages only
Hi experts, I present customer feedback, reviews basically, on my website for the products that are sold. And with this comes the ability to read reviews and obviously with pagination to display the available reviews. Now I want users to be able to flick through and read the reviews to help them satisfy whatever curiosity they have. My only thinking is that the page that contains the reviews, with each click of the pagination will present roughly the same content. The only thing that changes is the title tags which will contain the number in the H1 to display the page number. I'm thinking this could be duplication but i have yet to be notified by Google in my Search console... Should i block crawlers from crawling beyond page 3 of reviews? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk0 -
Japanese URL-structured sitemap (pages) not being indexed by Bing Webmaster Tools
Hello everyone, I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points: The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ ) The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji. Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed). When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either. My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this. When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded. I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps? Many thanks everyone for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
Image Sitemap
I currently use a program to create our sitemap (xml). It doesn't offer creating an mage sitemaps. Can someone suggest a program that would create an image sitemap? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
Sitemap for dynamic website with over 10,000 pages
If I have a website with thousands of products, is it a good idea to create a sitemap for this website for the search engines where you show maybe 250 products on a page so it makes it easy for the search engine to find the part and also puts that part closer to the home page? Seems like google likes pages that are the closest to the home page (less clicks the better)
Technical SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Universal Business Listing?
Can anyone recommend the best or a better alternative to submitting a clients site to multiple directories than Universal Business Listing? Is UBL the best or is there something better and/or less expensive out there? https://ubl.org Thanks
Technical SEO | | fun52dig0