Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?

    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.

    Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?

    Technical SEO
    5
    7
    5966
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • askotzko
      askotzko last edited by

      I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools.

      However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • askotzko
        askotzko @rhutchings last edited by

        Thanks, Ryan. I was confusing those.

        To execute the sitemap index, would I just point the crawlers to the index? Do you have any links to overviews of how to set that up?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • applesofgold
          applesofgold last edited by

          There are also scripts you can purchase for very little cost and have them install it for you on your server and set up a cron job to have your sitemap run automatically each week and ping the search engines to find your sitemap.

          One such service is at xml-sitemaps.com - they can install it for you and set up the cron job as well.

          Just make sure you are on a good server that can handle the script if your website is large.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • rhutchings
            rhutchings last edited by

            I think you may be getting xml sitemaps confused with sitemap pages.  Your xml sitemap should live at /sitemap.xml as Alan pointed out.   The seomoz and other sites that have a /sitemap page is for different purposes.  Its not your xml file, its a "topical guide" to your website and all the major sections of your site.

            Remember that you can also create a xml sitemap index if you need to have different sitemaps (video, news, content) that houses all the different xml sitemaps underneath it.

            askotzko 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • CaseyKluver
              CaseyKluver @askotzko last edited by

              Typically I use /sitemap.xml

              I dont think it matters what you call it, as long as its submitted to Google webmaster tools.

              Check out sitemaps.org for more info on how to create a quality sitemap

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • askotzko
                askotzko last edited by

                Great, thanks!

                Should we also have it live at /sitemap, as SEOmoz does?

                CaseyKluver 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • AlanMosley
                  AlanMosley last edited by

                  Yes they will pick it up, you can put the address in your robots.txt file,

                  http://thatsit.com.au/robots.txt

                  then you dont need to submit it and all search engines will find it.

                  Keeep it up todate, free from 404's, 301's all urls should be status code 200, and keep it accurate. Bing for one will igniore it if it is not clean and acurate, they allow only a couple of percent error rate.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • Chophel

                    My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.

                    Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages.  I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
                    {YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
                    {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
                    {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
                    {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
                    {YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
                    {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
                    {YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
                    {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
                    {HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
                    {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php

                    Technical SEO | | Chophel
                    0
                  • RoxBrock

                    Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search

                    I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
                    Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.

                    Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
                    1
                  • thinkcreativegroup

                    Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?

                    We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!

                    Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup
                    1
                  • Theo-NL

                    302 redirect used, submit old sitemap?

                    The website of a partner of mine was recently migrated to a new platform. Even though the content on the pages mostly stayed the same, both the HTML source (divs, meta data, headers, etc.) and URLs (removed index.php, removed capitalization, etc) changed heavily. Unfortunately, the URLs of ALL forum posts (150K+) were redirected using a 302 redirect, which was only recently discovered and swiftly changed to a 301 after the discovery. Several other important content pages (150+) weren't redirected at all at first, but most now have a 301 redirect as well. The 302 redirects and 404 content pages had been live for over 2 weeks at that point, and judging by the consistent day/day drop in organic traffic, I'm guessing Google didn't like the way this migration went. My best guess would be that Google is currently treating all these content pages as 'new' (after all, the source code changed 50%+, most of the meta data changed, the URL changed, and a 302 redirect was used). On top of that, the large number of 404's they've encountered (40K+) probably also fueled their belief of a now non-worthy-of-traffic website. Given that some of these pages had been online for almost a decade, I would love Google to see that these pages are actually new versions of the old page, and therefore pass on any link juice & authority. I had the idea of submitting a sitemap containing the most important URLs of the old website (as harvested from the Top Visited Pages from Google Analytics, because no old sitemap was ever generated...), thereby re-pointing Google to all these old pages, but presenting them with a nice 301 redirect this time instead, hopefully causing them to regain their rankings. To your best knowledge, would that help the problems I've outlined above? Could it hurt? Any other tips are welcome as well.

                    Technical SEO | | Theo-NL
                    0
                  • pugh

                    Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS

                    I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive. It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile. Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product. My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content? Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?

                    Technical SEO | | pugh
                    0
                  • inlinear

                    Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?

                    Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
                    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
                    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html 
                    RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
                    2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
                    Holger

                    Technical SEO | | inlinear
                    0
                  • nomad-202323

                    Can dynamically translated pages hurt a site?

                    Hi all...looking for some insight pls...i have a site we have worked very hard on to get ranked well and it is doing well in search. The site has about 1000 pages and climbing and has about 50 of those pages in translated pages and are static pages with unique urls. I have had no problems here with duplicate content and that sort of thing and all pages were manually translated so no translation issues. We have been looking at software that can dynamically translate the complete site into a handfull of languages...lets say about 5. My problem here is these pages get produced dynamically and i have concerns that google will take issue with this aswell as the huge sudden influx of new urls....as now we could be looking at and increase of 5000 new urls. (which usually triggers an alarm) My feeling is that it could be risking the stability of the site that we have worked so hard for and maybe just stick with the already translated static pages. I am sure the process could be fine but fear a manual inspection and a slap on the wrist for having dynamically created content?? and also just risk a review trigger period. These days it is hard to know what could get you in "trouble" and my gut says keep it simple and as is and dont shake it up?? Am i being overly concerned? Would love to here from others who have tried similar changes and also those who have not due to similar "fear" thanks

                    Technical SEO | | nomad-202323
                    0
                  • Ant-808

                    How long will Google take to stop crawling an old URL once it has been 301 redirected

                    I need to do a clean-up old urls that have been redirected in sitemap and was wondering about this.

                    Technical SEO | | Ant-808
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.