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
-
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">
<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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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!
-
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
-
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!
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
-
Pending Sitemaps
Hi, all Wondering if someone could give me a pointer or two, please. I cannot seem to get Google or Bing to crawl my sitemap. If I submit the sitemap in WMT and test it I get a report saying 44,322urls found. However, if I then submit that same sitemap it either says Pending (in old WMT) or Couldn't fetch in the new version. This couldn't fetch is very puzzling as it had no issue fetching the map to test it. My other domains on the same server are fine, the problem is limited to this one site. I have tried several pages on the site using the Fetch as Google tool and they load without issue, however, try as I may, it will not fetch my sitemap. The sitemapindex.xml file won't even submit. I can confirm my sitemaps, although large, work fine, please see the following as an example (minus the spaces, of course, didn't want to submit and make it look like I was just trying to get a link) https:// digitalcatwalk .co.uk/sitemap.xml https:// digitalcatwalk .co.uk/sitemapindex.xml I would welcome any feedback anyone could offer on this, please. It's driving me mad trying to work out what is up. Many thanks, Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wonkydogadmin0 -
Can I add external links to my sitemap?
Hi, I'm integrating with a service that adds 3rd-party images/videos (owned by them, hosted on their server) to my site. For instance, the service might have tons of pictures/videos of cars; and then when I integrate, I can show my users these pictures/videos about cars I might be selling. But I'm wondering how to build out the sitemap--I would like to include reference to these images/videos, so Google knows I'm using lots of multimedia. How's the most white-hat way to do that? Can I add external links to my sitemap pointing to these images/videos hosted on a different server, or is that frowned upon? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOdub0 -
Which search engines should we submit our sitemap to?
Other than Google and Bing, which search engines should we submit our sitemap to?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NicheSocial0 -
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
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 | | EcommerceSite0 -
Should I redirect my xml sitemap?
Hi Mozzers, We have recently rebranded with a new company name, and of course this necessitated us to relaunch our entire website onto a new domain. I watched the Moz video on how they changed domain, copying what they did pretty much to the letter. (Thank you, Moz for sharing this with the community!) It has gone incredibly smoothly. I told all my bosses that we may see a 40% reduction in traffic / conversions in the short term. In the event (and its still very early days) we have in fact seen a 15% increase in traffic and our new website is converting better than before so an all-round success! I was just wondering if you thought I should redirect my XML sitemap as well? So far I haven't, but despite us doing the change of address thing in webmaster tools, I can see Google processed the old sitemap xml after we did the change of address etc. What do you think? I know we've been very lucky with the outcome of this rebrand but I don't want to rest on my laurels or get tripped up later down the line. Thanks everyone! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
XML Sitemap on another domain
Hi, We've rebuilt our website and created a better sitemap index structure. There's a good chance that we not be able to append the XML files to existing site for technical reasons (don't get me started). I'm reaching out because I'm wondering if can we place the XML files on another website or subdomain? I know this is not best practice and probably very grey but I'm looking for alternatives. If there answer is DON'T DO IT let me know too. Thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
How important are sitemap errors?
If there aren't any crawling / indexing issues with your site, how important do thing sitemap errors are? Do you work to always fix all errors? I know here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds Duane Forrester mentions that sites with many 302's 301's will be punished--does any one know Googe's take on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0