Is a Rel="cacnonical" page bad for a google xml sitemap
-
Back in March 2011 this conversation happened.
Rand: You don't want rel=canonicals.
Duane: Only end state URL. That's the only thing I want in a sitemap.xml. We have a very tight threshold on how clean your sitemap needs to be. When people are learning about how to build sitemaps, it's really critical that they understand that this isn't something that you do once and forget about. This is an ongoing maintenance item, and it has a big impact on how Bing views your website. What we want is end state URLs and we want hyper-clean. We want only a couple of percentage points of error.
Is this the same with Google?
-
LOL thanks!
-
You're very welcome.
And just try to think about it this way... every best practice you employ for your site is another best practice your competitors have to employ to keep up with you
-
Yes I understand that. It is just a lot more work for us to do with our site map! Thanks for your advice.
-
To clarify, when I say rel="canonical" pages, I mean pages that are using that link tag to point to another page (i.e., the pages that are NOT the canonical page). These are also the pages that Duane and Rand were talking about.
I am not saying you shouldn't include pages that are included in the actual link tag.
Let's assume you have 3 pages: A, B, and C.
Pages B and C have a rel="canonical" link that points to A.
In this scenario, you would include A in your XML Sitemap (assuming A is a high-quality page that is important to your site), and you would NOT include B and C.
-
I see. but the rel="canonical" pages are good page. I get the broken links and all that part but I guess i do not agree with rel="canonical" as much. I can see their standpoint. Do you do a lot with your site map and assign the different values to different pages?
-
Yes, it is safe to assume that all search engines want your XML Sitemaps to be as clean and accurate as possible.
XML Sitemaps give you an opportunity to tell search engines about your most important pages, and you want to take advantage of this opportunity.
Think about it another way. Let's pretend your site and Google are both real people. In that hypothetical world, Google's first impression of your site is established through your site's XML Sitemaps. If those Sitemaps are full of broken links, redirecting URLs, and rel="canonical" pages, your site has already made a bad first impression ("If this site can't maintain an up-to-date Sitemap, I'm terrified of what I'll find once I get to the actual pages").
On the other hand, if your XML Sitemaps are full of live links that point to your site's most important pages, Google will have a positive first impression and continue on with the relationship
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
-
Keep getting "/feed" broken links in Google Search Console
Hey guys, I'm having an issue for the past few months. I keep getting "/feed" broken links in Google Search Console (screenshot attached). The site is a WordPress site using the YoastSEO plugin for on-page SEO and sitemap. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Did you fix it? How should I redirect these links? s7elXMy
Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian0 -
Why google does not remove my page?
Hi everyone, last week i add "Noindex" tag into my page, but that site still appear in the organic search. what other things i can do for remove from google?
Technical SEO | | Jorge_HDI0 -
My some pages are not showing cached in Google, WHY?
I have website http://www.vipcollisionlv.com/ and when i check the cache status with tags **site:http:vipcollisionlv.com, **some page has no cache status.. you can see this in image. How to resolve this issue. please help me.
Technical SEO | | 1akal0 -
Should I remove these pages from the Google index?
Hi there, Please have a look at the following URL http://www.elefant-tours.com/index.php?callback=imagerotator&gid=65&483. It's a "sitemap" generated by a Wordpress plug-in called NextGen gallery and it maps all the images that have been added to the site through this plugin, which is quite a lot in this case. I can see that these "sitemap" pages have been indexed by Google and I'm wondering whether I should remove these or not? In my opinion these are pages that a search engine would never would want to serve as a search result and pages that a visitor never would want to see. Attracting any traffic through Google images is irrelevant in this case. What is your advice? Block it or leave it indexed or something else?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0 -
What is the difference between "Referring Pages" and "Total Backlinks" [on Ahrefs]?
I always thought they were essentially the same thing myself but appears there may be a difference? Any one care to help me out? Cheers!
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Website Migration - Very Technical Google "Index" Question
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specifc: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" connects to the "page directory". I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I ask is I am starting to work with a client who has a newly developed website. The old website domain and files were located on a GoDaddy account. The new websites files have completely changed location and are now hosted on a separate GoDaddy account, but the domain has remained in the same account. The client has setup domain forwarding/masking to access the files on the separate account. From what I've researched domain masking and SEO don't get along very well. Not only can you not link to specific pages, but if my above assumption is true wouldn't Google have a hard time crawling and storing each page in the cache?
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
Xml Sitemap
Hi mozzers, I am about to submit a sitemap for one of my clients via webmaster tools. The issue is that I have way too many urls that I don't want them to be indexed by Google such as testing pages, auto generated pages... Is there way to remove certain URL from the XML sitemap or is this impossible? If impossible, is the only way to control these urls is to "No index" all these pages that i don't want the search engine to see? Thanks Mozzers,
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0