Add selective URLs to an XML Sitemap
-
Hi!
Our website has a very large no of pages. I am looking to create an XML Sitemap that contains only the most important pages (category pages etc). However, on crawling the website in a tool like Xenu (the others have a 500 page limit), I am unable to control which pages get added to the XML Sitemap, and which ones get excluded.
Essentially, I only want pages that are upto 4 clicks away from my homepage to show up in the XML Sitemap.
How should I create an XML sitemap, and at the same time control which pages of my site I add to it (category pages), and which ones I remove (product pages etc).
Thanks in advance!
Apurv
-
Thanks a lot for sharing Travis. This is really helpful!
Appreciate your help here.
-
Hey Intermediate,
Here's my setup - image - http://screencast.com/t/qThC401hQVUp Be careful of the line breaks if you want your sitemap to be pretty (I'm not sure if it also works if everything is on a single line).
Column A:
Column B:
URLColumn
<lastmod>2013-08-27</lastmod>
Column
<changefreq>always</changefreq>Column E:
<priority>1</priority>Column F:
=CONCATENATE(A2,B2,C2,D2,E2)You will need to add this as first 2 lines in your sitemap:
and add to the end, but you should be good to go!
I Hope that helps! -
Thanks Schwaab!
-
Hi Travis
That sounds like a smart way to go about this. Could you please guide me regarding how to add parameters like lastmod, priority, changefreq etc in the XML sitemap, using the URLs that I have in the Excel sheet.
Thanks!
-
If you have a list of all the URLs on your site, it is easy to create a sitemap using excel. I have a template that I use and I can crank out a 50k URL sitemap in 5 minutes.
-
I would recommend purchasing Screaming Frog. You can crawl the site and sort the URLs by level. Remove the URLs that are too deep from the crawl and export to XML sitemap. Screaming Frog is definitely worth the price to unlock all of its features and have an unlimited crawl limit.
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
-
Technical URL SEO question
Hi All, We sell a product on our site which is displayed in cubic metres, from an SEO perspective is it ok to have /3m³ in the URL or should I use 3m3. Thanks All
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
Which pages should I index or have in my XML sitemap?
Hi there, my website is ConcertHotels.com - a site which helps users find hotels close to concert venues. I have a hotel listing page for every concert venue on my site - about 12,000 of them I think (and the same for nearby restaurants). e.g. https://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484 Each of these pages list the nearby hotels to that concert venue. Users clicking on the individual hotel are brought through to a hotel (product) page e.g. https://www.concerthotels.com/hotel/the-new-yorker-a-wyndham-hotel/136818 I made a decision years ago to noindex all of the /hotel/ pages since they don't have a huge amount of unique content and aren't the pages I'd like my users to land on . The primary pages on my site are the /venue-hotels/ listing pages. I have similar pages for nearby restaurants, so there are approximately 12,000 venue-restaurants pages, again, one listing page for each concert venue. However, while all of these pages are potentially money-earners, in reality, the vast majority of subsequent hotel bookings have come from a fraction of the 12,000 venues. I would say 2000 venues are key money earning pages, a further 6000 have generated income of a low level, and 4000 are yet to generate income. I have a few related questions: Although there is potential for any of these pages to generate revenue, should I be brutal and simply delete a venue if it hasn't generated revenue within a time period, and just accept that, while it "could" be useful, it hasn't proven to be and isn't worth the link equity. Or should I noindex these "poorly performing pages"? Should all 12,000 pages be listed in my XML sitemap? Or simply the ones that are generating revenue, or perhaps just the ones that have generated significant revenue in the past and have proved to be most important to my business? Thanks Mike
Technical SEO | | mjk260 -
Search Console rejecting XML sitemap files as HTML files, despite them being XML
Hi Moz folks, We have launched an international site that uses subdirectories for regions and have had trouble getting pages outside of USA and Canada indexed. Google Search Console accounts have finally been verified, so we can submit the correct regional sitemap to the relevant search console account. However, when submitting non-USA and CA sitemap files (e.g. AU, NZ, UK), we are receiving a submission error that states, "Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page," despite them being .xml files, e.g. http://www.t2tea.com/en/au/sitemap1_en_AU.xml. Queries on this suggest it's a W3 Cache plugin problem, but we aren't using Wordpress; the site is running on Demandware. Can anyone guide us on why Google Search Console is rejecting these sitemap files? Page indexation is a real issue. Many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | SearchDeploy0 -
Sitemap issue
How can I create XML as well as HTML sitemaps for my website (both eCommerce and non - eCommerce )Is there any script or tool that helps me making perfect sitemapPlease suggest
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Question about construction of our sitemap URL in robots.txt file
Hi all, This is a Webmaster/SEO question. This is the sitemap URL currently in our robots.txt file: http://www.ccisolutions.com/sitemap.xml As you can see it leads to a page with two URLs on it. Is this a problem? Wouldn't it be better to list both of those XML files as separate line items in the robots.txt file? Thanks! Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Benefits to having an HTML sitemap?
We are currently migrating our site to a new CMS and in part of this migration I'm getting push-back from my development team regarding the HTML sitemap. We have a very large news site with 10s of thousands of pages. We currently have an HTML sitemap that greatly helps with distributing PR to article pages, but is not geared towards the user. The dev team doesn't see the benefit to recreating the HTML sitemap despite my assurance that we don't want to lose all these internal links since removing 1000s of links could have a negative impact on our Domain Authority. Should I give in and concede the HTML sitemap since we have an XML one? Or am I right that we don't want to get rid of it?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Ok to Put a Decimal in a URL?
I'm in the process of creating new product specific URLs for my company. Some of our products have decimals in them for their names as a unit of measurement. For example - .The URL for a 050" widget would be something like: http://www.example.com/product/category/.050-inch-widget My question is - Can I use a decimal in the URL without ticking off the search engines, and/or causing any other unexpected effects?
Technical SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
Should we block URL param in Webmaster tools after URL migration?
Hi, We have just released a new version of our website that now has a human readable nice URL's. Our old ugly URL's are still accessible and cannot be blocked/redirected. These old URL's use a URL param that has an xpath like expression language to define the location in our catalog. We have about 2 million pages indexed with this old URL param in it while we have approximately 70k nice URL's after the migration. This high number of old URL's is due to facetting that was done using this URL param. I wonder if we should now completely block this URL param from Google Webmaster tools so that these ugly URL's will be removed from the Google index. Or will this harm our position in Google? Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO0