Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Multilingual Sitemaps

    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.

    Multilingual Sitemaps

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    8
    18949
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Angelos_Savvaidis
      Angelos_Savvaidis last edited by

      Hey there, I have a site with many languages. So here are my questions concerning the sitemaps. The correct way of creating a sitemap for a multilingual site is as followed ( by the official blog of Google )

      <urlset xmlns="</span>http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

      http://www.example.com/loc>

      <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="</span>http://www.example.com/"/>

      <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="</span>http://www.example.com/de"/>

      <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="</span>http://www.example.com/fr"/><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" fr"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" de"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"="" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></urlset>

      **So here is my first question. My site has over 200.000 pages that all of them support around 5-6 languages. Am I suppose to do this example 200.000 times?****My second question is. My root domain is www.example.com but this one redirects with 301 to www.example.com/en should the sitemap be at ****www.example.com/sitemap.xmlorwww.example.com/en/sitemap.xml ???****My third question is as followed. On WMT do I submit my sitemap in all versions of my site? I have all my languages there.**Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond to this thread and by creating it I hope many people will solve their own questions.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • kirstybethkb
        kirstybethkb last edited by

        Thank you so much for replying to me.

        Sorry I’ve just realise I’ve made a mistake in my first comment. We are using .com for our main site and we plan to add subfolders for individual countries in the future. Currently, we only have /row for all the countries outside of the UK that we deliver to.

        Thanks again for getting back!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • katemorris
          katemorris @kirstybethkb last edited by

          Ah, yes! If you have multiple locations, but the same content in each location you would want to submit a sitemap per country-specific area. However, is your domain on .co.uk? If you are trying to target other countries that are not the UK with that ccTLD, you are going to have a hard time as that is specific to the UK.

          However, if you are on a gTLD (general domain), and have country-specific folders, you should have a sitemap per country.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • kirstybethkb
            kirstybethkb @katemorris last edited by

            GHi Kate,

            Does your advice on points 2 and 3 also apply to location targeted subfolders? We have a separate subfolder for all of the countries we deliver to outside of the UK at www.example.co.uk/row however the content is in the same language from our uk site.

            We have claimed this as a separate property on Google Search Console.

            I realise it’s years later but hopefully someone is able to answer this query 🙂

            I did read your article https://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic but wasn’t sure if it is the same when trying to target specific countries with a subfolder.

            Thanks in advance.

            katemorris 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • katemorris
              katemorris last edited by

              Thanks for the shout out Ryan!

              Hi Angelos.

              1. The short answer is yes, you should do all of those entries. Annoying right?

              The best way to go about this is going to be writing a script to do the heavy lifting, but I am not cool enough to tell you how to do that. The idea would be to make one sitemap in one language, and if the URLs are identical except for the language code, then changing up everything for the next language and moving on one at a time.

              You should have one main sitemap per language if you can get all of your content into one sitemap. Then have one sitemap index hosted at domain.com/sitemap.xml.

              If that's not possible due to the sheer number of pages, do a sitemap index per language that references multiple sitemaps to cover the content in that one language. Then have another sitemap index that references the other indices per language.

              2.  See above. The main sitemap index should be at domain.com/sitemap.xml, BUT you can have each language sitemap hosted in each subfolder. Example: English sitemap at domain.com/en/sitemap.xml and Spanish sitemap at domain.com/es/sitemap.xml. This requires listing many sitemaps in the main robots.txt file or having a robots file for each subfolder. It's a lot more work than working with sitemap indices.

              3. If you have claimed all language subfolders as independent sites in WMT, you can submit the corresponding sitemap. You don't have to put the sitemaps in the subfolders to do this though, you can still use the indices. You also don't have to submit them all individually, but you can and I would as I would want to see the index information in each corresponding account. That's just me though.

              Does that all help?

              kirstybethkb 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • RyanPurkey
                RyanPurkey @Angelos_Savvaidis last edited by

                Per Google's recommendations here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en, yes you want to have pages correctly tagged with their alternate language translations. Per the blog I cited earlier, you'll want to organize the sitemaps to break out the 200.000 pages in a structure that's more refined than just 'all', specifically in ways that will help you find if there are problems creeping up in one section or another. Good luck!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Angelos_Savvaidis
                  Angelos_Savvaidis @RyanPurkey last edited by

                  It is indeed a great article but certainly does not answer any of my questions 🙂 ( or i havent read the article correct )

                  My first question is: Do i have to do this

                  <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

                  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/"/>

                  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" de"="" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/de"/>

                  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" fr"="" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/fr"/></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link>

                  for all my 200.000 + sitemap pages?

                  Thanks Ryan for taking the time to answer 🙂

                  RyanPurkey 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • RyanPurkey
                    RyanPurkey last edited by

                    Kate Morris wrote a nice post on how to break up sitemaps for large sites a few years ago, but it still holds true today: http://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic, so following the advice there should help on your first question.

                    Your 301 redirect to English should probably be a 302 and based on browser language settings.  Is it possible for anyone to get to a file or folder at www.example.com/whatever...?

                    Third, see the blog mentioned above. She gets into the details of how to create an Index format for your soon to be many sitemaps.  Cheers!

                    Angelos_Savvaidis 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • ricoplaza

                      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 | | ricoplaza
                      0
                    • lgrozeva

                      This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location error using pro-sitemaps.com

                      Hey, guys, We are using the pro-sitemaps.com tool to automate our sitemaps on our properties, but some of them give this error "This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location" for all the urls. Strange thing is that not all of them are with the error and most have all the urls indexed already. Do you have any experience with the tool and what is your opinion? Thanks

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lgrozeva
                      0
                    • ChrisHolgate

                      Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?

                      We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
                      I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
                      1
                    • EcommerceSite

                      Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?

                      I am working on an ecommerce site and I am going to add different views to the category pages. The views will all have different urls so I would like to add the rel="canonical" tag to them. Should I still add these pages to the sitemap?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite
                      0
                    • BruLee

                      Different domains for multilingual website

                      Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee
                      0
                    • cprodigy29

                      Where to link to HTML Sitemap?

                      After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions. Should you have an HTML sitemap? If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from? Should you use a noindex, follow tag? Thank you

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy29
                      0
                    • CareerBliss

                      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 | | CareerBliss
                      0
                    • rhysmaster

                      Online Sitemap Generator

                      I have a site that has around 5,000 pages now. Are there any recommened online free/paid tools to generate a sitemap for me?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.