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  4. <loc>tag empty in sitemap, is this ok?</loc>

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<loc>tag empty in sitemap, is this ok?</loc>

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  • Jenny1
    Jenny1 Subscriber last edited by Nov 24, 2014, 2:45 PM

    Hi - our website's sitemap is pretty huge, and I'm trying to generate it with the hreflang= information in it, because we have 11 different language sites all under the .com. I used the Media Flow generator for this purpose, but it returned a lot of entries with a blank tag. Our U.S. website by far has the most pages, so an example of what I'm getting is:

    Does this look correct???? Doesn't to me but I'm unsure.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • gfiorelli1
      gfiorelli1 last edited by Dec 1, 2014, 12:20 PM Nov 29, 2014, 7:11 PM

      Your mistake is that you probably used relative URLs and not absolute ones (these are the ones like: http://www.domain.com/)

      So, the hreflang in sitemaps.xml for your home page should be this (please note that I put /it/ but you should put the real italian version home page, and that is valid for all URLs:

      <url><loc>http://www.domain.com/</loc></url>

      As for your second question - mixing matching and not matching URLs in the hreflang annotations - I would not suggest it.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Jenny1
        Jenny1 Subscriber last edited by Nov 25, 2014, 11:57 AM Nov 25, 2014, 11:57 AM

        Doesn't look right to me either. My next question would be, should I mix the sitemap for urls that have a match in other countries with those that don't? Like this:

        <url><loc>http://www.mywebsite.com</loc>
                <lastmod>2014-11-12</lastmod>
                <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
                <priority>0.8</priority></url>

        <url><loc>http://www.mywebsite.com/blah.html</loc></url>

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Martijn_Scheijbeler
          Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by Dec 1, 2014, 12:20 PM Nov 25, 2014, 5:34 AM

          Well it doesn't seem correct to me, as the location for the english page is the original URL in there it should also have an origin. That URL should be in the <loc>tag.</loc>

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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