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.
<loc>tag empty in sitemap, is this ok?</loc>
-
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.
-
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.
-
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>
-
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>
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
-
The Bad effect of Submitting Sitemap frequently?
Hi Mozzer... so, i keep thinking of this... what is the bad effect of submitting the sitemap frequently? is it something like google would smell something suspicious and begin to decrease my website's authority? and is there any supporting articles for it? my website is an e-commerce website by the way... so please, help me with this.. Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 6, 2017, 7:56 AM | ricoplaza0 -
[Very Urgent] More 100 "/search/adult-site-keywords" Crawl errors under Search Console
I just opened my G Search Console and was shocked to see more than 150 Not Found errors under Crawl errors. Mine is a Wordpress site (it's consistently updated too): Here's how they show up: Example 1: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html/feed/rss2 Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html Example 2 (this surprised me the most when I looked at the linked from data): URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/3/ Linked From: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/2/ (this is showing as if it's from our own site) http://a-spammy-adult-site.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html Example 3: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html How do I address this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 23, 2016, 3:53 PM | rmehta10 -
Sitemap: unique sitemap or different sitemaps by Country
Hi guys, i have a question about sitemaps. We are doing an international site, e.x. www.offers.com for landing page and www.offers.com/br for brazil, www.offers.com/it for italy, etc... i don't if we should do an unique sitemap for all countries or separate sitemaps by country, e.x.: unique sitemap: www.offers.com/sitemap.xml - including all sitemaps www.offers.com/br/sitemap.xml - sitemap for brazil market only. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 22, 2016, 6:03 AM | thekiller990 -
Google News Sitemap in Different Languages
Thought I'd ask this question to confirm what I already think. I'm curious that if we're publishing something in two language and both are verified by the publishing center if the group would recommend publishing two separate Google News Sitemaps (one in each language) or publishing one in each language.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 9, 2016, 4:43 PM | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice
Hello Mozzers, I was wondering whether there's any best practice guidance out there re: how to deal with membership/subscriber (existing customer) only content on a website, from an SEO perspective - what is best practice? A few SEOs have told me to make some of the content visible to Google, for SEO purposes, yet I'm really not sure whether this is acceptable / manipulative, and I don't want to upset Google (or users for that matter!) Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 19, 2015, 7:10 PM | McTaggart0 -
Why Put an H1 Tag On A Product?
Why would you put an H1 tag on a product name? I came across this in another forum and thought I'd float it here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 1, 2012, 4:04 PM | AWCthreads0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 17, 2011, 5:37 PM | jorgediaz0 -
Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?
We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking. Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps? Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 5, 2011, 1:33 AM | CareerBliss0