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.
<loc>tag empty in sitemap, is this ok?</loc>
-
Hi - our website's sitemap is pretty huge, and I'm trying to generate it with the hreflang= information in it, because we have 11 different language sites all under the .com. I used the Media Flow generator for this purpose, but it returned a lot of entries with a blank tag. Our U.S. website by far has the most pages, so an example of what I'm getting is:
Does this look correct???? Doesn't to me but I'm unsure.
-
Your mistake is that you probably used relative URLs and not absolute ones (these are the ones like: http://www.domain.com/)
So, the hreflang in sitemaps.xml for your home page should be this (please note that I put /it/ but you should put the real italian version home page, and that is valid for all URLs:
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/</loc></url>
As for your second question - mixing matching and not matching URLs in the hreflang annotations - I would not suggest it.
-
Doesn't look right to me either. My next question would be, should I mix the sitemap for urls that have a match in other countries with those that don't? Like this:
<url><loc>http://www.mywebsite.com</loc>
<lastmod>2014-11-12</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority></url><url><loc>http://www.mywebsite.com/blah.html</loc></url>
-
Well it doesn't seem correct to me, as the location for the english page is the original URL in there it should also have an origin. That URL should be in the <loc>tag.</loc>
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
-
How to stagger <h>tags?</h>
This might seem like a silly question, but It's one that I would like to get some responses from the SEO community. Do <h>tags need to be staggered according to the numbers? For example: A few of our clients have their h1 tag listed on a mid-way header that is halfway down their page, and there are both h2's and h3's listed before the h1 in the source code. Does this matter? Let me know!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaylorRHawkins
Thanks! </h>2 -
Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?
Hello, Everyone! I am trying to do a clean up for one of my client sites. I'm noticing that the Categories and tags are way out of hand. It looks like random tags and categories were just added because they could be added. Are all of these tags and categories contributing to duplicate content? And if so What method should I go about to cleaning this up? The only thing that seems logical to me is rel=canonical. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Striventa1 -
What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Putting Dates In Title Tag
Hi, I have a site were I write previews for sports match ups. I notice when I don't put the date in the title I rank much better for specific keywords. I also noticed that most people don't really put in the date when they do the search anyways, especially since google does a good job of showing the most recent pages anyways. The only reason I continue to put the date is because of this whole idea of not having page titles that are duplicate. So many of our games will be Team A vs Team B Preview, and Im worried that the term "preview" will become so repetitive that google may not like it. Any tips or ideas on how to approach this issue best? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tarafaraz1 -
Should I use **tags or h1/h2 tags for article titles on my homepage**
I recently had an seo consultant recommend using tags instead of h1/h2 tags for article titles on the homepage of my news website and category landing pages. I've only seen this done a handful of times on news/editorial websites. For example: http://www.muscleandfitness.com/ Can anyone weigh in on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blankslatedumbo0 -
Citation/Business Directory Question...
A company I work for has two numbers... one for the std call centre and one for tracking SEO. Now, if local citation/business directory listings have the same address but different numbers, will this affect local/other SEO results? Any help is greatly appreciated! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geniusenergyltd0 -
Article/ Blog Post submissions
Hello All, I'm looking to perform a 'Standard' guest blog post link building tactic, but i'm a little unsure as where to start. Does anybody have a list/ guide to websites that accept guest posts? Preferably ones that are useful for SEO purposes, I have been link building for about 3 months now, but to be honest, most of these links are NoFollow, which isn't too great! Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Tool to check XML sitemap
Hello, Can anyone help me finding a tool to have closer look of the XML sitemap? Tks in advance! PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0