Using a single sitemap for multiple domains
-
We have a possible duplicate content issue based on the fact that we have a number of websites run from the same code base across .com / .co.uk / .nl / .fr / .de and so on. We want to update our sitemaps alongside using the href lang tags to ensure Google knows we've got different versions of essentially the same page to serve different markets.
Google has written an article on tackling this:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en but my question remains whether having a single sitemap accessible from all the international domains is the best approach here or whether we should have individual sitemaps for each domain.
-
Jon -
If you have the different websites running with different languages (i.e. .com is English, .nl is Dutch, .fr is French, etc), then you should probably have a separate sitemap for each site.
If they are all the same language, and you just have the site loading with .com / .nl / .fr, then Google will see this as duplicate content and you should likely make changes to keep them a bit more separate...
Thanks,
-- Jeff
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
-
Still ok to use
This is the flag to prevent google storing a copy of your webpage. I want to use it for good reasons but in 2013 is it still safe to use. My websites not spammy but it's still very fresh with little to no links. Each item I sell takes a lot of research to both buy and sell with the correct info. Once it's sold one I may just come across another and want to hold my advantage of having already done my research and my sold price to myself. Competitors will easily find my old page from a long tail search. Some off my old sold pages keep getting hits and high bounce rates from people using it as reasearch and price benchmark. I want to stop this. So, No archive first, then 301 to category page once sold. Will the two cause a problem in googles eyes?
Technical SEO | | Peter24680 -
When to use canonical urls
I will be the first to admit I am never really 100% sure when to use canonical urls. I have a quick question and I am not really sure if this is a situation for a canonical or not. I am looking at a my friends building website and there are issues with what pages are ranking. Basically there homepage is focusing on the building refurbishment location but for some reason in internal page is ranking for that keyword and it is not mentioned at all on that page. Would this be a time to add the homepage url and a canonical on the ranking page (using yoast plugin) to tell Google that the homepage is the preferred page? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | propertyhunter0 -
Multiple Domains pointing to one IP
Hi we have some issues with Multiple domains pointing to one IP. is this considered duplicate content by Google? If so, what is the best thing can we do to avoid this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
Host sitemaps on S3?
Hey guys, I run a dynamic web service and I will start building static sitemaps for it pretty soon. The fact that my app lives in a multitude of servers doesn't make it easy to distribute frequently updated static files throughout the servers. My idea was to host the files in AWS S3 and point my robots.txt sitemap directive there. I'll use a sitemap index so, every other sitemap will be hosted on S3 as well. I could dynamically mirror the content from the files in S3 through my app, but that would be a little more resource intensive than just serving the static files from a common place. Any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tanlup0 -
Why does everyone use bitly?
Why do people use bitly? I thought it was just a way to share a link on twitter if the link was too long in url. I see SeoMoz shares all their content with a bitly link. Even when they share it on Google+. Why?
Technical SEO | | JML11790 -
Should a 301 from a penalised domain to a new domain be removed?
A business traded on a domain let's say example.COM which was heavily penalised due to non-removable spammy back links. Their previous SEO advised them to set up on example.CO.UK but redirected example.COM to example.CO.UK. Example.CO.UK ranks very poorly, presumably due to being 'tarred with the same brush' i.e. attributed with the ills of example.COM. Will it do any good to remove the redirect or is example.CO.UK now doomed as well?
Technical SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy1 -
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 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0