Sitemap Best Practices
-
My question is regarding the URL structure best practices of a sitemap. My website allows search any number of ways, i.e.
1. http://www.website.com/category/subcategory/product
2. http://www.website.com/subcategory/product
3. http://www.website.com/product
However, I am not sure which structure to use in the sitemap (which is being written manually). I know that for SEO purposes the 3rd option is best as the link is more relevant to that individual product, but the Moz tool states that the home page should have less than 100 links (although Google doesn't penalise for having more) and by writing my entire site in the 3rd way it would result in a lot more links adjoining to the home page.
It is either the 2nd or 3rd option, I think, as the 1st category is not keyword specific (rather a generic term, i.e. novelties).
Does anyone have experience with this?
-
Happy to help!
-
Thanks Logan!
-
Google is less concerned about the actual structure of your URLs, and more concerned that you pick a horse and ride it, which you've done by canonicalizing 2 variations to the third. In your example, the third URL is perfectly fine, since it will always remain constant. The other 2 can change depending on how someone navigates to that product. I'd keep it the way you have it.
-
Hello Logan, thanks for responding, although you've not responded to my actual question as such.
Yes, currently I am canonicalising links 1 and 2 toward link 3, but my question wasn't regarding which URL to use in the sitemap, but rather what Googles preferred URL structure was.
Does Google dislike the link 3 structure because it makes it links every product and category directly to the home page? It would appear that the Moz tool seems to think so (although they state that you're not penalised for it).
In your experience, what is Googles preferred URL structure, link 1, 2 or 3? I can easily change the Canonical tag to either of the three, that isn't an issue.
-
Hi,
In your example, you have 3 URLs that render the same content it sounds like. If this is the case, I would assume you're canonicalizing 2 versions to the third. In this situation, you'd want to use the canonical version in your XML sitemaps. You don't want to point search engines to URLs in a XML sitemap then have them go elsewhere when they find the canonical tag.
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
-
Viral Marketing SEO Question: If you build a truly great piece of content, what are the best ways to seed it?
There are a few techniques you can use to spread out and get your content out there.
Moz Pro | | shoobi
1. Email bloggers and tell them about your content
2. Share it on bookmarking sites (like Reddit)
3. Contact influential Twitter and Facebook profiles about it
4. Make it easy for visitors to share your infographic with an embed code at the bottom
5. Share it on infographic websites (like https://www.prizebondtime.com)
6. Share it with your email subscribers (if you have an email subscriber list)
7. Post it on your blog, Facebook page, Twitter, etc. Basically everywhere. The name of the game here is to get your content out in front of as many eyeballs you can as possible. Then after that, it's up to how good your content is to begin the viral loop.0 -
Help with best seo strategy
Hello all, I am a little bit confused about the "content suggestion'' feature in Moz. If I understood well, this feature suggests Anchor texts we can use in other page to link to the page we are trying to Optimize. So far, I've been using page keyword as Anchor Text in other articles. For example, I have a page about the best places to visit in Morocco, where the keyword is 'places to visit in Morocco'. I am using this same keyword as Anchor text in other pages to link to that page. While Moz suggests '10 best places' as Anchor text. What does it mean ? Is '10 best places' anchor text better ? Or should I use both ? Thanks in advance for your enlightenment.
Moz Pro | | sportygirl0 -
How to choose the best canonical URL
In a duplicate content situation, and assuming that both rel=canonical and a 301 redirect pass link equity (I know there is still some speculation on this), how should you choose the "best" version of the URL to establish as the redirect target or authoritative URL? For example, we have a series of duplicate pages on our site. Typically we choose the "cleanest" or shortest non-trailing-slash version of the URL as the canonical, but what if those pages are already established and have varying page authority/backlink profiles? The URLs are: example.com/stores/locate/index?parameters=tags - PA = 54, Inbound Links = 259 example.com/stores/locate/index - PA = 60, Inbound Links = 302 example.com/stores/ - This is the version that currently ranks. PA = 42, Inbound Links = 3 example.com/stores - PA = 40, Inbound Links = 8 This might not really even matter, but in the interests of conserving as much SEO value as possible, which would you choose as either the 301 redirect target and/or the canonical version? My gut is to go with the URL that's already ranking (example.com/stores/) but curious if PA, backlinks, and trailing slashes should be considered also. We of course would not 301 the URL with the tracking parameters. 🙂 Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | Critical_Mass0 -
What is the best free 'contact finder' tool?
What is the best free 'contact finder' tool? By contact finder I mean a tool that can search multiple websites and display the contact details of each site. Why do Moz not provide such a tool? Thanks
Moz Pro | | conor10050 -
What is the best ranking checker solution for 100's of sites
Hello, We used IBP for over 2 years and it worked great. We were able to schedule every clients site to auto run and email our clients. Now IBP is terrible due to Google's new updates. We are looking for something cost effective since we have 100's of websites we check on a weekly basis. We are either looking for a great software that uses proxies to check, or a service that offers unlimited sites and is cheap per month. We have searched for many, however there are so many that we aren't sure what is good and what isn't. We tried Jonathan Ledgers new one and it's not good, we looked into Web CEO and it's per amount of websites which is expensive. We tried cute rank tracker which is free and added proxies and it doesn't work, it lags out and doesn't even track ranks properly. It wouldn't hurt if it had a built in report analysis of the website as well. So whats a good one?
Moz Pro | | MarketingOfAmerica0 -
How can I submit my sitemap file to SEOmoz? (I mean the same file I send to google and bing, not the sitemap page)
I'm new to SEOmoz. As far as I understand, SEOmoz goes out to my site and crawls it to find all the pages. Is there anyway I can submit my sitemap page to SEOmoz just like I submit it to Google or Bing? Thanks for your help! Fernando
Moz Pro | | fsantospt0 -
Best Practices for having Social Profiles indexed
There has been a lot of talk lately around social profiles potentially improving your brand as well as search. What I'd like to know is the best practices for getting those social profiles crawled and indexed so they actually provide a good link to my site. I'm also wondering what the difference between what Linkscape sees and what Google sees and when I'm looking at Open Site Explorer's rankings on one of those social profiles how can I be sure that Google sees it the same way. I ask this because a lot of these profiles are not well internally linked to. An example is about.me, it's a potentially great link, but it's essentially an island, and even after dropping a couple Twitter links to my profile, Open Site Explorer shows and Page Authority of 1, and it's not even indexed with Google. What I did last night was put a link to my about.me, flickr and wedding wire in my Connect menu drop down on my site to get that crawled hopefully soon. Are there other methods of getting those crawled and indexed so it starts passing some juice?
Moz Pro | | WilliamBay
What do you guys do?0