Sitemap with homepage URL repeated several times - it is a problem?
-
Hello Mozzers,
I am looking at a website with the homepage repeated several times (4 times) on the sitemap (sitemap is autogenerated via a plugin) - is this an SEO problem do you think - might it damage SEO performance, or can I ignore this issue?
I am thinking I can ignore, yet it's an odd "issue" so your advice would be welcome!
Thanks, Luke
-
Many thanks Eric - much appreciated - that clarifies everything perfectly
-
Generally speaking, this is normal, and you shouldn't have to worry about it. There's a Google Webmaster thread that pointed to this issue specifically, and Google gave an official response (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitemaps-duplicate-16128.html)
"This is apparently normal if you submit Sitemap files with the same URLs listed multiple times. Since submitting the same URLs multiple times doesn't change anything with regards to your site's crawling & indexing, I'd just submit it once if you want the correct counts (alternately, if the count doesn't bother you, you can also just leave it like this."
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
-
Google Only Indexing Canonical Root URL Instead of Specified URL Parameters
We just launched a website about 1 month ago and noticed that Google was indexing, but not displaying, URLs with "?location=" parameters such as: http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/?location=great-falls-virginia and http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/?location=mclean-virginia. Instead, Google has only been displaying our root URL http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/ in its search results -- which we don't want as the URLs with specific locations are more important and each has its own unique list of houses for sale. We have Yoast setup with all of these ?location values added in our sitemap that has successfully been submitted to Google's Sitemaps: http://www.castlemap.com/buy-location-sitemap.xml I also tried going into the old Google Search Console and setting the "location" URL Parameter to Crawl Every URL with the Specifies Effect enabled... and I even see the two URLs I mentioned above in Google's list of Parameter Samples... but the pages are still not being added to Google. Even after Requesting Indexing again after making all of these changes a few days ago, these URLs are still displaying as Allowing Indexing, but Not On Google in the Search Console and not showing up on Google when I manually search for the entire URL. Why are these pages not showing up on Google and how can we get them to display? Only solution I can think of would be to set our main /local-house-values/ page to noindex in order to have Google favor all of our other URL parameter versions... but I'm guessing that's probably not a good solution for multiple reasons.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nitruc0 -
Optimizing A Homepage URL That Is Only Accessible To Logged In Users
I have a client who has a very old site with lots and lots of links to it. The site offers www.examplesite.com/loggedin as the homepage to logged in users. So, once you're logged in, you can't get back to examplesite.com anymore (unless you log out) and are instead given /loggedin as your new personalized homepage. The problem is that many users over time who linked to the site linked to the site they saw after they signed up and were logged in.... www.examplesite.com/loggedin. So, there's all these inbound links going to a page that is inaccessible to non-logged-in users. Thus linking to nowheresville. One idea is to fire off a 301 to non-logged in users, forwarding them to the homepage. Thus capturing much of that stranded link juice. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure you can fire off a server code conditioned on if they are logged in or not. I imagine you can, but don't know that for a technical fact. Another idea is to offer some content on /loggedin that is right now mostly currently blank, except for an offer to sign in. Which do you think is better and why? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
301 Redirects to relative URLs not absolute a problem?
Hi we recently did a migration and a lot of content changed locations see: https://d.pr/i/RvqI81 Basically, the 301 goes to the correct location but its a relative URL (as you can see from the screenshot) rather than absolute URL. Do you think this is a high priority issue from an SEO standpoint, should we get the developer to change the redirects to absolute? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Website URL Structure - keyword targeting on homepage vs internal pages
I have developed a few websites before where the homepage contains the content for the keywords I was targeting. This has been reasonably successful as I have found it easy enough to get links to the homepage. I am considering a new site in a totally different industry that I am thinking about structuring like this: mybrand.com (not necessarily targeting any keywords) mybrand.com/important-keyword-1/ (definitely want to target) mybrand.com/important-keyword-2 (equally important as 1st keyword) There will be several (30-ish) other pages targeting keywords but they are not as significant as the two mentioned above, more so they are about publishing informative information. The two important keywords are quite different but industry related. My questions are: should I be careful targeting keywords away from the homepage when the homepage gets the most links? Would I be better off building 2 different websites where the keyword content is captured in the homepage? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BGu0 -
301 forwarding old urls to new urls - when should you update sitemap?
Hello Mozzers, If you are amending your urls - 301ing to new URLs - when in the process should you update your sitemap to reflect the new urls? I have heard some suggest you should submit a new sitemap alongside old sitemap to support indexing of new URLs, but I've no idea whether that advice is valid or not. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Renaming a URL
Hi, If we rename a URL (below) http://www.opentext.com/2/global/company/company-ecm-positioning.htm
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pstables
to http://www.opentext.com/2/global/products/enterprise-content-management.htm (or something similar) Would search engines recognize that as a new page altogether? I know they would need to reindex it accordingly, so in theory it is kind of a "new" page. But the reason for doing this is to maintain the page's metrics (inbound links, authority, social activity, etc) instead of creating a new page from scratch. The page has been indexed highly in the past, so we want to keep it active but optimize it better and redirect other internal content (that's being phased out) to it to juice it up even more. Thanks in advance!
Greg0 -
Should I shorten my urls?
For my informational site I have a lot of urls that are way too long. When I first created the site, I wrote a script that takes out the common words of a post and fashions a url. So, for example, if the first few words of a question were: Hi there, I have a question about back pain. I'm wondering what drugs would be good for relief and how I can get some help? then my url may be: www.mydomain.com/question?id=123-question-back-pain-wondering-drugs-good-relief-how-get-some-help Once I got learning about seo I realized that these urls were too long but I never did anything about them. Should I be shortening these, or is my time best spent doing something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes2