Indexing product attributes in sitemap
-
Hey Mozzers!
I'm battling a few questions about the sitemap for my ecommerce store. Could you help me out?
- Is it necessary to include your product attributes in the sitemap? I'm not sure why it would matter to have a sitemap that lists everything in the color cherry. Also, if the attributes were included in the sitemap, would that count as duplicate content for the same products to show up in multiple attributes?
- Is there any benefit to submitting the sitemaps individually? For example, submitting /product-sitemap.xml, /product_brand-sitemap.xml versus just /sitemap.xml?
Any other best practices for managing my ecommerce sitemap, or great resources, would be very helpful.
Thank you!
-
Hello Localwork,
By "product attributes" do you mean URLs associated with product variants, like color and size? From the context of your question, I'll assume for now you mean that each product attribute / variant appears on it's own URL (e.g. /?color=red and /?color=blue) and you want to know whether these should be included in the sitemap.
As Andy mentions below, more information is needed before prescribing a best practice specifically to your situation. However, in this case you should probably only have the one "canonical" version of the product URL (e.g. without variants). There are many ways to handle this and I recommend Googling "SEO for product variants" to familiarize yourself with the pros and cons of each.
To answer your question about sitemap segmentation, yes it is a good thing to do for several reasons, most important of which is easier diagnoses of crawl issues, such as which "sections" of your sites have indexation problems. It also helps on large sites with issues reaching URL limits in sitemaps, and is a more logical tree-like structure for people and machines to follow than having every URL in one sitemap.
-
Hi,
Without knowing a little more detail, it's hard to say with 100% certainty, but I can't see why the sitemap should have every iteration of a product in there. These pages (pages that are produced due to an attribute change) should rel=canonical back to the main product page anyway and this will handle duplication.
And unless you many many thousands of products in each sitemap, then you wouldn't want to be splitting them up like this, although you can rationalize these somewhat depending on the products and site.
Just remember that the sitemap is only there as an aid to helping Google crawl and there is no actual SEO benefit to this. It is whatever is going to make the most sense to the site and to Google.
-Andy
Edit: Just Tweeted this out as well to see if others wish to chime in
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
-
Does a number of products in anchor text (link to product list page) have any influence on SEO?
For example: shower cabins (660), used in our onpage-navigation which links to a product list page.
Technical SEO | | Maxaro.nl0 -
Indexation and visibility problem
Hi I am working on a website (usarrestsearch org) for 6 months. I wrote about 100 pages full of good content. for some reason I see only 75% of the pages indexed in GWT. and Im having problems with SERP positions not rising. I suspect that it might be connected to the structure of the site. will appreciate any help thanks
Technical SEO | | holdportals0 -
What would cause a sudden drop in indexed sitemap pages?
I have made no changes to my site for awhile and on 7/14 I had a 20% drop in indexed pages from the sitemap. However my total indexed pages has stayed the same. What would cause that?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
No index
Screaming frog spider does index pages on our website like: wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/assets/js/frontend/jquery-ui-touch-punch.min.js?ver=2.3.9 wp-content/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/assets/css/checkbox.min.css?ver=2.3.2 Is it a bad/good idea to set my parameters in Webmastertools and tell Google not to crawl pages that begin with wp/content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
Help! Pages not being indexed
Hi Mozzers, I need your help.
Technical SEO | | bshanahan
Our website (www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com) stopped being indexed in search engines following a round of major changes to URLs and content. There were a number of dead links for a few days before 301 redirects were properly put in place. And now, only 3 pages show up in bing when I do the search "site:barnettcapitaladvisors.com". A bunch of pages show up in Google for that search, but they're not any of the pages we want to show up. Our home page and most important services pages are nowhere in search results. What's going on here?
Our sitemap is at http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/sites/default/files/users/AndrewCarrillo/sitemap/sitemap.xml
Robots.txt is at: http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/robots.txt Thanks!0 -
Sitemap Generator Tool
We have developed a very large domain with well over 500 pages that need to be indexed. The tool we usually use to create a sitemap has a limit of 500 pages. Does anyone know of good tool we can use to create a sitemap text and xml that doesn't have a limit of pages? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TracSoft0 -
Block a sub-domain from being indexed
This is a pretty quick and simple (i'm hoping) question. What is the best way to completely block a sub domain from getting indexed from all search engines? One item i cannot use is the meta "no follow" tag. Thanks! - Kyle
Technical SEO | | kchandler0 -
Sitemaps - Format Issue
Hi, I have a little issue with a client site whose programmer seems kind of unwilling to change things that he has been doing a long time. So, he has had this dynamic site set up for a few years and active in google webmaster tools and others, but is not happy with the traffic it is getting. When I looked at webmaster tools I see that he has a sitemap registered, but it is /sitemap.php When I said that we should be offering the SE's /sitemap.xml his response is that sitemap.php checks the site every day and generates /sitemap.xml, but there is no /sitemap.xml registered in webmaster tools. My gut is telling me that he should just register /sitemap.xml in webmaster tools, but it is a hard sell 🙂 Anyone have any definitive experience of people doing this before and whether it is an issue? My feeling is that it doesn't need to be rocket science... Any input appreciated, Sha
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0