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.
2 sitemaps on my robots.txt?
-
Hi,
I thought that I just could link one sitemap from my site's robots.txt but... I may be wrong.
So, I need to confirm if this kind of implementation is right or wrong:
robots.txt for Magento Community and Enterprise
...
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.es/media/sitemap/es.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.pt/media/sitemap/pt.xmlThanks in advance,
-
We recently changed our protocol to https
We have in our robots.txt our new https sitemap link
Our agency is recommending we add another sitemap in our robots.txt file to our insecure sitemap - while google is reindexing our secure protocol. They recommend this as a way for all SEs to pick up on 301 redirects and swap out unsecured results in the index more efficiently.
Do you agree with this?
I am in the camp that we should have have our https sitemap and google will figure it out and having 2 sitemaps one to our old http and one to our new https in our robots.txt is redundant and may be viewed as duplicate content, not as a positive of helping SEs to see 301s better to reindex secure links.
Whats your thought? Let me know if I need to explain more.
-
Well if both sitemaps are for same site then it's OK. But it's much better to implement hreflang as this is explained here:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en
I'm not sure that Magento can do this but you always can hire 3rd party dev for building plugin/module for this.
-
ok, just one detail: these domains are for a multilang site.
I mean, both have quite the same content: one in spanish and the other un portuguese.
Thanks a lot.
-
You can also have multiple sitemaps on 3rd sites. Look at Moz robots.txt:
Sitemap: https://moz.com/blog-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://moz.com/ugc-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://moz.com/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://d2eeipcrcdle6.cloudfront.net/past-videos.xml
Sitemap: http://app.wistia.com/sitemaps/36357.xmlAlso Google.com robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/culturalinstitute/sitemaps/www_google_com_culturalinstitute/sitemap-index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sitemaps/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/earth/gallery/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/trends/websites/sitemaps/sitemapindex.xml
Sitemap: https://www.google.com/sitemap.xmlAlso Bing.com robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://cn.bing.com/dict/sitemap-index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.bing.com/offers/sitemap.xmlSo using multiple sitemaps it's OK and they can be also hosted on 3rd party server.
-
Hello,
Yes, multiple sitemaps are okay, and sometimes even advised!
You can read Google's official response here."..it's fine for multiple Sitemaps to live in the same directory (as many as you want!)..."
And you can see a case study showing how multiple sitemaps has helped traffic here on Moz.
Hope this helps,
Don
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
-
Robots.txt Tester - syntax not understood
I've looked in the robots.txt Tester and I can see 3 warnings: There is a 'syntax not understood' warning for each of these. XML Sitemaps:
Technical SEO | | JamesHancocks1
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml How do I fix or reformat these to remove the warnings? Many thanks in advance.
Jim0 -
Automate XML Sitemaps
Quick question, which is the best method that people have for automating sitemaps. We publish around 200 times a day and I would like to make sure as soon as we publish it gets updated in the site map. What is the best method of updating a sitemap so it gets updated immediately after it is published.
Technical SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap
Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing. You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page. Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice. Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!
Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson0 -
Googlebot does not obey robots.txt disallow
Hi Mozzers! We are trying to get Googlebot to steer away from our internal search results pages by adding a parameter "nocrawl=1" to facet/filter links and then robots.txt disallow all URLs containing that parameter. We implemented this late august and since that, the GWMT message "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site", stopped coming. But today we received yet another. The weird thing is that Google gives many of our nowadays robots.txt disallowed URLs as examples of URLs that may cause us problems. What could be the reason? Best regards, Martin
Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark0 -
How would you create and then segment a large sitemap?
I have a site with around 17,000 pages and would like to create a sitemap and then segment it into product categories. Is it best to create a map and then edit it in something like xmlSpy or is there a way to silo sitemap creation from the outset?
Technical SEO | | SystemIDBarcodes0 -
Removing robots.txt on WordPress site problem
Hi..am a little confused since I ticked the box in WordPress to allow search engines to now crawl my site (previously asked for them not to) but Google webmaster tools is telling me I still have robots.txt blocking them so am unable to submit the sitemap. Checked source code and the robots instruction has gone so a little lost. Any ideas please?
Technical SEO | | Wallander0 -
Robots.txt Sitemap with Relative Path
Hi Everyone, In robots.txt, can the sitemap be indicated with a relative path? I'm trying to roll out a robots file to ~200 websites, and they all have the same relative path for a sitemap but each is hosted on its own domain. Basically I'm trying to avoid needing to create 200 different robots.txt files just to change the domain. If I do need to do that, though, is there an easier way than just trudging through it?
Technical SEO | | MRCSearch0 -
How to generate a visual sitemap using sitemap.xml
Are there any tools (online preferably) which will take a sitemap.xml file and generate a visual site map? Seems like an obvious thing to do, but can't find any simple tools for this?
Technical SEO | | k3nn3dy30