Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?
-
We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking.
Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps?
Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here:
http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible.
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
It's easy to implement. I've broken the content up into multiple sitemaps before as a diagnostic tool as well, to see which sections of the site are getting most of their pages indexed and which sections of the site have few pages indexed.
-
You only need to use a sitemap index file if you have over 50,000 URL's. So if your site is that massive, then yes you'll want to do this. Basically all you do is create a bunch of sitemaps. You can then create a sitemap index file that is just a list of links to those sitemaps. You then submit your sitemap index file to google or each sitemap individually. Just glancing at your link it is pretty darn clear, there's not much to it.
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
-
URL structure change and xml sitemap
At the end of April we changed the url structure of most of our pages and 301 redirected the old pages to the new ones. The xml sitemaps were also updated at that point to reflect the new url structure. Since then Google has not indexed the new urls from our xml sitemaps and I am unsure of why. We are at 4 weeks since the change, so I would have thought they would have indexed the pages by now. Any ideas on what I should check to make sure pages are indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ang0 -
Best Sitemap for Large Website
i have more than 3500 pages on my website. Please let me know the best sitemap plugin for my website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard1 -
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 -
Can't get auto-generated content de-indexed
Hello and thanks in advance for any help you can offer me! Customgia.com, a costume jewelry e-commerce site, has two types of product pages - public pages that are internally linked and private pages that are only accessible by accessing the URL directly. Every item on Customgia is created online using an online design tool. Users can register for a free account and save the designs they create, even if they don't purchase them. Prior to saving their design, the user is required to enter a product name and choose "public" or "private" for that design. The page title and product description are auto-generated. Since launching in October '11, the number of products grew and grew as more users designed jewelry items. Most users chose to show their designs publicly, so the number of products in the store swelled to nearly 3000. I realized many of these designs were similar to each and occasionally exact duplicates. So over the past 8 months, I've made 2300 of these design "private" - and no longer accessible unless the designer logs into their account (these pages can also be linked to directly). When I realized that Google had indexed nearly all 3000 products, I entered URL removal requests on Webmaster Tools for the designs that I had changed to "private". I did this starting about 4 months ago. At the time, I did not have NOINDEX meta tags on these product pages (obviously a mistake) so it appears that most of these product pages were never removed from the index. Or if they were removed, they were added back in after the 90 days were up. Of the 716 products currently showing (the ones I want Google to know about), 466 have unique, informative descriptions written by humans. The remaining 250 have auto-generated descriptions that read coherently but are somewhat similar to one another. I don't think these 250 descriptions are the big problem right now but these product pages can be hidden if necessary. I think the big problem is the 2000 product pages that are still in the Google index but shouldn't be. The following Google query tells me roughly how many product pages are in the index: site:Customgia.com inurl:shop-for Ideally, it should return just over 716 results but instead it's returning 2650 results. Most of these 1900 product pages have bad product names and highly similar, auto-generated descriptions and page titles. I wish Google never crawled them. Last week, NOINDEX tags were added to all 1900 "private" designs so currently the only product pages that should be indexed are the 716 showing on the site. Unfortunately, over the past ten days the number of product pages in the Google index hasn't changed. One solution I initially thought might work is to re-enter the removal requests because now, with the NOINDEX tags, these pages should be removed permanently. But I can't determine which product pages need to be removed because Google doesn't let me see that deep into the search results. If I look at the removal request history it says "Expired" or "Removed" but these labels don't seem to correspond in any way to whether or not that page is currently indexed. Additionally, Google is unlikely to crawl these "private" pages because they are orphaned and no longer linked to any public pages of the site (and no external links either). Currently, Customgia.com averages 25 organic visits per month (branded and non-branded) and close to zero sales. Does anyone think de-indexing the entire site would be appropriate here? Start with a clean slate and then let Google re-crawl and index only the public pages - would that be easier than battling with Webmaster tools for months on end? Back in August, I posted a similar problem that was solved using NOINDEX tags (de-indexing a different set of pages on Customgia): http://moz.com/community/q/does-this-site-have-a-duplicate-content-issue#reply_176813 Thanks for reading through all this!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rja2140 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
How to generate xml sitemape for an ecommerce site with more than 50000 pages?
Hi, I am new to the forum and struggling hard to work on xml sitemap for an ecommerce site. Site is dynamic and more that 50,000 pages (including product pages). Challenges I am facing should I opt for category wise xml sitemap? how to include new product pages (dynamically) I was wondering if there is any tool that can generate xml site map online (I mean as soon as a new page is added to the site it will pick up automatically). thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | posy0 -
Can I use a "no index, follow" command in a robot.txt file for a certain parameter on a domain?
I have a site that produces thousands of pages via file uploads. These pages are then linked to by users for others to download what they have uploaded. Naturally, the client has blocked the parameter which precedes these pages in an attempt to keep them from being indexed. What they did not consider, was they these pages are attracting hundreds of thousands of links that are not passing any authority to the main domain because they're being blocked in robots.txt Can I allow google to follow, but NOT index these pages via a robots.txt file --- or would this have to be done on a page by page basis?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PapaRelevance0 -
Can your site be penalised by backlinks?
Hi, I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site. We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized. I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though. Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0