Omitting URLs from XML Sitemap - Bad??
-
Hi all,
We are working on an extremely large retail site with some major duplicate content issues that we are in the process of remedying. The site also does not currently have an XML sitemap.
Would it be advisable to create a small XML sitemap with only the main category pages for the time being, and then after our duplicate content issues are resolved, uploading the complete sitemap? Or should we wait to upload anything until all work is complete down to the product page level and canonicals are in place? Will uploading a incomplete sitemap be fraudulent or misleading in the eyes of the search engines and prompt a penalty, or would having at least the main pages mapped while we continue work be okay?
Please let me know if more info is needed to answer! Thanks in advance!
-
Some good answers here, so I'll just throw in my own 2 cents.
The purpose of a sitemap is to help search engines find pages they might not otherwise find during a regular crawl. Sometimes sitemaps can help pages get indexed faster. Other sitemaps serve special purposes, such as News or Video sitemaps, which can add extra information and help ranking particular types of content.
In reality, many, many sitemaps are incomplete, missing, or flat out wrong. To my knowledge, no search engine will penalize you for this, as they would be penalizing half the web.
The danger of an inaccurate sitemap is that the search engines may chose to ignore it completely. Daune Forrester of Bing has stated that if they find a 1% error rate in your sitemap file, then they will disregard the file. However, no such action is known to exist for incomplete sitemaps.
So I'd say there is little in submitting a sitemap of your truly important page. Unfortunately, this won't stop Google from discovering or crawling your duplicate content issues.
The faster you get these fixed, the better.
-
Hi Thomas,
Definitely comforting to hear that you ran your site with an incomplete sitemap without seeing any negative results. Like I said in my response above, I think we will proceed with the partial sitemap, just to have one on there, and then upload a complete one once we can clean up the site a little more. Thanks for your insights - they were very helpful!
-
Hi Saijo,
Thanks for your recommendations! We do want to place a little more emphasis on our top level and main navigation pages, so I think we will probably proceed with a preliminary sitemap with just those pages for now. Once we get to that point, we'll definitely be needing to use multiple sitemaps and an index - thanks for pointing this out!
-
I ran my site with an incomplete site map for years and didn't seem to have a negative effect. I feel that any site map is better than no sitemap. Sitemaps are such a small part of the SEO equation. What they are most useful for is telling Google what to crawl. Beyond that, I don't believe they have much relevance in passing authority.
-
My Theory On this ( I have no tests to prove this )
If you upload a verified site map thats is essentially telling Google these are the important pages on my site. would you want to risk the importance of the other pages by telling Google you consider only the few important categories as the important ones . They wont drop the other pages completely but MIGHT see them as less important .
I really don't see Google penalizing a site for incomplete sitemaps.
If you have a really large site you might also want to look in to multiple sitemaps : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2006/10/multiple-sitemaps-in-same-directory.html
You might also want to look in to the best situations to use rel canonical vs a 301 redirect .
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 the URL structure matter?
I have a blog on entertainment. does the url structure matter to rank my blog and iam also facing the issue of indexing of my blog. visit and check this if i need further changes.
Technical SEO | | Hammad784540 -
Sitemap indexation
3 days ago I sent in a new sitemap for a new platform. Its 23.412 pages but until now its only 4 pages (!!) that are indexed according to the Webmaster Tools. Why so few? Our stage-enviroment got indexed (more than 50K pages) in a few days by a mistake.
Technical SEO | | Morten_Hjort0 -
OSE says URL redirects to URL with trailing slash but it doesn't.
Site is www.example.com/folder/us and OSE says this URL redirects to www.example.com/folder/us/, but it does not. When I look at the OSE report for the latter version with the "/" it says "No Data Available For This URL". Why would that be? The original URL is www.example.com and it redirects to www.example.com/folder/us. Is this anything I need to worry about? I thought that the trailing / doesn't really mean much anymore but nonetheless, why does it think it redirects there?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
XML Feed
If a site has an xml feed being used by 100 companies to create the content on their site. Will those 100 sites receive any link juice? Is there any way content may be classed as duplicate across these sites? And should the page on the site where the xml feed is coming from have the page indexed first?
Technical SEO | | jazavide0 -
Sitemap.xml - autogenerated by CMS is full of crud
Hi all, hope you can help. the Magento ecommerce system I'm working with autogenerates sitemap.xml - it's well formed with priority and frequency parameters. However, it has generated lots of URLs that are pointing to broken pages returning fatal erros, duplicate URLs (not canonicals), 404s etc I'm thinking of hand creating sitemap.xml - the site has around 50 main pages including products and categories, and I can get the main page URLs listed by screaming frog or xenu. Then I'll have to get into the hand editing the crud pages with noindex, and useful duplicates with canonicals. Is this the way to go or is there another solution thanks in advance for any advice
Technical SEO | | k3nn3dy30 -
Keyword and URL
I have a client who has a popular name (like 'Joe Smith'). His blog URL has only his first name and the name of his company in it, like joe.company.com. His blog doesn't rank well at all in the first 3-4 Google SERPs. I was thinking of advising him to change the URL of his blog to joesmith.company.com, and having his webmaster do 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one. Do you think this is a good strategy, or would you recommend something else? I realize ranking isn't just about the URL, it's about links, etc. But I think making his URL more specific to his name could help. Any advice greatly appreciated! Jim
Technical SEO | | JamesAMartin0 -
URL with tracking code
Hi there, At the company i am currently working for we have a problem with shortcut url with tracking in it. They send a lot of brochures with a shortcut URL which redirects to the page of the event with tagging. For example The real URL is:
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen
http://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/ The URL in the brochure is:
www.sbo.nl/schoolleiderpo this then redirects to: h
ttp://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/?utm_source=direct&utm_medium=shortcut&utm_campaign=schoolleiderpo Now we can measure the effect of the brochure on on-line traffic and conversion. This is great but a lot of website link to that shortcut url and if the event is put offline the links to it generate an 404. We have now about 800 backlinks that generate this 404 and i want to fix it. Another big problem "i think" is the possibility that google will index this url with tagging. Now i have 2 options: 1. look at al the url with that 404 and redirect them with a 301 to the best page 2. create the shortcut on an page that is most suitable but then i will get the tagging in the URL and i guess google will see this as dublicate content. It is possible that in the future the shortcut url will be used again. What would you suggest as the best sollution.0 -
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