Do we need to update our sitemaps each time our content changes?
-
Dear SEO experts!
We have created sites maps to get our international sub-domains indexed, however we're unsure if we have to update our sitemaps each time our content changes on our many landing pages which are translated to 17 different languages? Obviously the goal is to make it dynamic so it updates itself.
I hope you can help us with some advice.
Thanks a lot!
Allan
-
Thanks a lot for your answers, fantastic!
Best regards,
Allan
-
Ahh yes, <lastmod>. How did I forget this, I'm usually such a stickler on sitemaps. Do you have any further info on 2% tolerance Alan, or is that just your personal findings? </lastmod>
-
I have to disagree, if you include <a><lastmod></a>2012-07-24T08:36:20Zlastmod> tag, then yes you should update it. Bing for example will ignore your site map if it is not accurate. The have a tolerance of about 2% errors.
If your site is only small, and all your pages are linked, then I would not even bother with a sitemap. Bing also stats that you should not list all your pages in a sitemap, but only your key pages.
Sitemaps don't help rankings only indexing, on large sites it is good to tell the search engine what pages have changed, or what pages are good pages to find links to other pages,
-
Hi Allan
You don't need to update the sitemap if the content has changed but the URL of the page remains the same. The only time I update sitemaps is 1. if there are new pages and 2. if we remove pages. If you don't update the sitemap after you remove a page then you'll get 404s (e.g. a busy e-commerce site when products are sold out and not going to be restocked, you'd remove the page).
-
Hey Allan,
You only need to update your sitemaps if you are creating new pages; if you are simply updating the content on pages that already exist in the sitemaps, you do not need to update them.
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
-
Multistore Sitemap
I use Magento 2 Multistore and have 2 stores set up with identical products, one for the EU and one for the US. The best practice is to allow Google to crawl both sites, but what about the sitemap? Should I only include one store? The reason I ask is that Google has recently started ignoring canonicalized URLs, so even though the second store is canonicalized, it could affect my rank. My rank did drop with the last update when this was rolled out, I stopped some canonicalized URLs from generating and my rank went back up (albeit not as high as before).
International SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Got hit by Spammy Structured Markup Penalty. Need Help
I have fixed the issue found in strctured data testing tool. Even I removed entire schema. Till now I have submitted reconsideration request 5 times and it rejected every time. Don't know how to lift this penalty. Any advise?? Need help guys my websites are going through very critical situations in terms of traffic from getting this manual action from Google. This is related to Pharma Industry.
International SEO | | rashmibhardwaj860 -
Migrating to a tag-driven global website - Need opinions!
We currently have a global site that is set up this way: Subfolders to designate countries. Content in same language is re-published on other country websites. Since we are re-launching at the end of the year, we are doing away with re-publishing content on different country sites and will just maintain a single copy of our content (to be populated on different pages using content tags). We are planning on doing this so that there is no need to apply href-lang tags on our content. My questions: Is maintaining just a single instance of an article good for a global website? What are the possible complications that may come up from this approach? Since there is only one version of the article that is being indexed, is a rel-canonical tag even needed? Should href-lang tag still be applied to high level pages (homepage, etc) to ensure that the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography? This question is quite long, so any feedback will be helpful. Thanks!
International SEO | | marshdigitalmarketing0 -
Change domain from .es to .com
Hi all, we have a website with 2 domains name to point to it: -hacerfamilia.es -hacerfamilia.com We used to take .es like the default domain, so the .com redirected to the .es with a 301 header. But now we decided to change to .com because it is more international. So default domain would be .com. We made a multiple redirect to .es to .com with a simple htaccess rule, with a 301 header. The hosting it is the same, and the address too, for the two domains. Should we take any other steps? Thank you.
International SEO | | seoseoseos0 -
Ranking well internationally, usage of hreflang, duplicate country content
I'm trying to wrap my head around various options when it comes to international SEO, specifically how to rank well in countries that share a language, and the risk of duplicate content in these cases. We have a chance to start from scratch because we're switching to a new e-commerce platform, and we were looking into using hreflang. Let's assume an example of a .com webshop that targets both Austria and Germany. One option is to include both language and region in the URL, and mark these as such using hreflang: webshop.com/de-de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
webshop.com/de-at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Another option would be to only include the language in the URL, not the region, and let Google figure out the rest: webshop.com/de/german-language-content (with hreflang de) Which would be better? The risk of inserting a country, of course, is that you're introducing duplicate content, especially since for webshops there are usually only minor differences in content (pricing, currency, a word here and there). If hreflang is an effective means to make sure that visitors from each country get the correct URL from the search engines, I don't see any reason not to use this way. But if search engines get it wrong, users will end up in the wrong page and will have to switch country, which could result in conversion loss. Also, if you only use language in the URL, is it useful at all to use hreflang? Aren't engines perfectly able to recognize language already? I don't mention ccTLDs here because most of the time we're required to use a .com domain owned by our customer. But if we did, would that be much better? And would it still be useful to use hreflang then? webshop.de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
webshop.at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Michel Hendriks
Docdata Commerce0 -
Impact of Japanese .jp site duplicate content?
Our main website is at http://www.traxnyc.com and we just launched a Japanese version of the site at http://www.traxnyc.jp domain. However all the images used on the .jp site are linked from the .com site. Would this hurt me in Google at all for hotlinking images? Also there is quite a bit of duplicate content on the .jp site at the moment: only a few things have been translated to Japanese and for the most part the layouts and words are exactly the same (in English). Would this hurt my Google rankings in the US at all? Thanks for all your help.
International SEO | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0 -
UK based people Need your help
I'm aware that this is not SEO related, but bare with me: Launching a new business venture and need some advise. the site will be located in the UK (for legal reasons) and since I have no experience with UK webhosts. I kinda need your help on selecting a good webhost. Money is not importants but what is: - excellent up times unlimited bandwidth So if you could share your experiences it would be much appreciated. thx in advance 🙂
International SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Panda Update rolled out to Spain, France, Italy and Germany?
There have been changes in the traffic of big websites in Spain, France, Germany and Italy, spread rumors about the Panda Update. Anyone can to support it?
International SEO | | IEmpresas-929330