XML Sitemaps - how to create the perfect XML Sitemap
-
Hello,
We have a site that is not updated very often - currently we have a script running to create/update the XML sitemap every time a page is added/edited or deleted. I have a few questions about best practices for creating XML sitemaps.
1. If the site is not updated for months on end - is it a bad idea to force the script to update i.e. changing the dates once a month? Will google noticed nothing has changed just the date i.e. all the content on the site is exactly the same. Will they start penalising you for updating an XML sitemap when there is nothing new about the website?
2. Is it worth automating the XML file to link into Bing/Google to update via webmaster tools - as I say even if the site is never updated?
3. Is the use of "priorities" necessary?
4. The changefreq - does that mean Google/Bing expects to see a new file ever month?
5. The ordering of the pages - the script seems pretty random and put the pages in a random order - should we make it order the pages with the most important ones first? Should the home page always be first?
6. Below is a sample of how our XML sitemap appears - is there anything that we should change? i.e. all marked up properly?This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"><url><loc>http://www.domain.com</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/contact/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/sitemap/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url></urlset>Hope someone can help enlighten us to best practices
-
1 Yes, Bing have stated that they will ignore the sitemap if it is not accurate
2. no
3, no
4 yes
5 no, use priorities for that
6 looks ok
I would look into using the Google and Bing sitemap generators, problem solved (if you have access to the server)
http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2013/05/23/bing-sitemap-plugin-1-0-launch.aspx
http://googlesitemapgenerator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/gsg-installation.html
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
-
Is there a way to tell if you were doing everything perfectly on the SEO front what your average SERP position and page views could be?
If you had optimised everything 100% on your website (keywords, links, everything), is there some tool or some way to figure out what your average SERP position could be and what volume of traffic you could be getting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnnaKot0 -
URL change - Sitemap update / redirect
Hi everyone Recently we performed a massive, hybrid site migration (CMS, URL, site structure change) without losing any traffic (yay!). Today I am finding out that our developers+copy writers decided to change Some URLs (pages are the same) without notifying anyone (I'm not going into details why). Anyhow, some URLs in site map changed, so old URLs don't exist anymore. Here is the example: OLD (in sitemap, indexed): https://www.domain.com/destinations/massachusetts/dennis-port NEW: https://www.domain.com/destinations/massachusetts/cape-cod Also, you should know that there is a number of redirects that happened in the past (whole site) Example : Last couple years redirections: HTTP to HTTPS non-www to www trailing slash to no trailing slash Most recent (a month ago ) Site Migration Redirects (URLs / site structure change) So I could add new URLs to the sitemap and resubmit in GSC. My dilemma is what to do with old URL? So we already have a ton of redirects and adding another one is not something I'm in favor of because of redirect loops and issues that can affect our SEO efforts. I would suggest to change the original, most recent 301 redirects and point to the new URL ( pre-migration 301 redirect to newly created URL). The goal is not to send mixed signals to SEs and not to lose visibility. Any advice? Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin0 -
Sitemap: unique sitemap or different sitemaps by Country
Hi guys, i have a question about sitemaps. We are doing an international site, e.x. www.offers.com for landing page and www.offers.com/br for brazil, www.offers.com/it for italy, etc... i don't if we should do an unique sitemap for all countries or separate sitemaps by country, e.x.: unique sitemap: www.offers.com/sitemap.xml - including all sitemaps www.offers.com/br/sitemap.xml - sitemap for brazil market only. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thekiller990 -
Substantial difference between Number of Indexed Pages and Sitemap Pages
Hey there, I am doing a website audit at the moment. I've notices substantial differences in the number of pages indexed (search console), the number of pages in the sitemap and the number I am getting when I crawl the page with screamingfrog (see below). Would those discrepancies concern you? The website and its rankings seems fine otherwise. Total indexed: 2,360 (Search Consule)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy
About 2,920 results (Google search "site:example.com")
Sitemap: 1,229 URLs
Screemingfrog Spider: 1,352 URLs Cheers,
Jochen0 -
Should we be showing last modified date for each page in our sitemap?
We're not currently displaying the last modified date in our sitemap, e.g.: <url><loc>http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/about-our-charity</loc></url> Are their any advantages to including this data? One benefit that occurred to us is that it will enable Google to determine which pages have fresh content and which are therefore worth crawling, helping Google index beneficial changes quicker. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SOS_Children1 -
We have a static sitemap and a blog...Uh oh!
Hi We have a static sitemap and a blog...Uh oh! We are are just realizing that the 2 are not very compatible!! We need a dynamic sitemap. Is there such a thing as a "set and forget" sitemap that updates itself without us maintaining a database of sitemap data? Thanks Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Can you create Flickr Group Snippets?
A few years ago, I established about 25 different flickr groups. Part experiment to see if it would help with SEO (at the time Flickr groups were do follow) and also to promote my travel website Most of these groups are now on the front page for their keyword. Most of them show the standard Flickr Snippet, but a few don't. I'm wondering if any brainiacs know how to get all of them to show a custom snip. Here's one that has a unique snip http://www.flickr.com/groups/best-san-francisco-restaurants/ the Best San Francisco Restaurants group icon ... Group Stats - traffic & page views for Best Restaurants San Francisco · JulieMarg, 0, 35 months ago ... http://www.flickr.com/groups/travel-like-james-bond-007/ Oct 12, 2008 – the Travel Like James Bond group icon ... On my website, I've got a post about Traveling like James Bond, detailing hotels & places & events ... and one that shows the standard (it's AT&T Park San Frrancisco) http://www.flickr.com/groups/711180@N24/ Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world, securely ...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | juliemarg0 -
Xml sitemap advice for website with over 100,000 articles
Hi, I have read numerous articles that support submitting multiple XML sitemaps for websites that have thousands of articles... in our case we have over 100,000. So, I was thinking I should submit one sitemap for each news category. My question is how many page levels should each sitemap instruct the spiders to go? Would it not be enough to just submit the top level URL for each category and then let the spiders follow the rest of the links organically? So, if I have 12 categories the total number of URL´s will be 12??? If this is true, how do you suggest handling or home page, where the latest articles are displayed regardless of their category... so I.E. the spiders will find l links to a given article both on the home page and in the category it belongs to. We are using canonical tags. Thanks, Jarrett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarrett.mackay0