A few sitemap questions
-
1. When I do a sitemap through a generator, it lists some of my URLs twice, with and without the last slash. Ex:
<url><loc>http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-hollywood</loc><lastmod>2013-11-25T16:12:50+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.9</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-hollywood/</loc><lastmod>2013-11-25T16:14:27+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.69</priority></url>
Should I remove one of these or leave it?
2. What is the importance of lastmod? I've read that if you have a lastmod listed, Google won't recrawl until a new time/date is up?
3. This goes along with lastmod, but is changefreq important? Can it hurt me at all?
-
If the tool is listing those URLs with and without the slash I guess you are linking to those pages with and without the ending slash. You should check your site and remove the one that shouldn't be there.
Also, check if the "wrong" version redirects to the "correct" one or at least has the "correct" URL in the canonical tag.
The lastmod should be the date that the page was last modified, however, most sitemap generators don't know when that was so they just use the timestamp and a changefreq daily to tell Google basically that they need to scrape the page everyday. In most cases, that's not the case as the page remains the same for years, but that won't hurt you at all as Google has its own methods to verify if a page has changed and "learn" how often your site/page updates that it needs to re-scrape it.
Hope that helps!
-
If sitemap generator is generating two URLs that mean Google will also find two versions of the same page that might cause a duplication issue.
My advice would be to add a canonicalization on each page so that Google should know what the original URL of the page is. If website does not have many pages and adding a 301 redirection will not cause an impact on site speed, adding 301 to a preferred version of the URL is a good option too!
2<sup>nd</sup> question, Google won’t recrawl until the new time and date is up! I don’t think so, sitemap does help Google in crawling and indexing the site but I have seen website that get indexed who do not have sitemap on the website at all.
So, when a website with no sitemap can get indexed then chances are Google will come again with its time regardless of any modified date!
3<sup>rd</sup> question, Chance frequency will hurt? No! If you have a proper navigation on your website, Google will find all links anyways!!
Hope this helps
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
-
Ctr question with home page and product pages
do you believe that the advantage of targeting a search term on the home page is now worse off than before? as I understand it ctr is a big factor now And as far as i can see if two pages are equal on page etc the better ctr will win out, the issue with the home page is the serp stars cannot be used hence the ctr on a product page will be higher? I feel if you where able to get a home page up quicker (1 year instead of two) you still lost out in the end due to the product page winning on ctr? do you think this is correct?
Algorithm Updates | | BobAnderson0 -
Does Sitemap really matters today?
Hi. Our website has multiple subdomians and domain platform is wordpress. But we haven't submitted sitemap to Google. Is this Okay? Or it's mandatory to submit sitemap? Is submitting a sitemap gonna help us in ranking improvement?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Sitemaps for landing pages
Good morning MOZ Community, We've been doing some re-vamping recently on our primary sitemap, and it's currently being reindexed by the search engines. We have also been developing landing pages, both for SEO and SEM. Specifically for SEO, the pages are focused on specific, long-tail search terms for a number of our niche areas of focus. Should I, or do I need to be considering a separate sitemap for these? Everything I have read about sitemaps simply indicates that if a site has over 50 thousand pages or so, then you need to split a sitemap. Do I need to worry about a sitemap for landing pages? Or simply add them to our primary sitemap? Thanks in advance for your insights and advice.
Algorithm Updates | | bwaller0 -
How is this possible? #2 ranking with NO on-page keywords, no backlinks, no sitemap...
Hi everybody. I have a question ... I'm totally stumped. This question is being asked today (November 16th, 2015) just after Google updated something in their algorithm. Nobody seems to know what they did. and it has something to do with the new "Rank Brain" system they're now using. My niche is Logo Design Software (https://www.thelogocreator.com). I had the keywords "logo creator" on the page roughly 7 times. After Google updated, I lost about 10 spots and as of this writing, I've dropped to #15. So, maybe I over optimized. fine. Noticing that for the keyword "logo creator" ... NONE of the top 14 spots actually have "logo creator" in their page title and NONE of them have more that 2 instances (if any) of the keyword "logo creator" on the actual page. So I removed ALL instances of my keyword "logo creator" from my home page - used the Webmaster's Fetch Tool and moved up a few spots instantly. So what the heck? And the #2 spot for that keyword is www.logomakr.com - they have NO words at all on their pages, no blog, no sitemap and far fewer links than anybody in the top 10. Can anybody reading this shed some light? Marc Marc Sylvester
Algorithm Updates | | Laughingbird
Laughingbird Software0 -
Dumb International SEO question?
Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK... Client asks - "My swedish site is http://www2.kingspanpanels.se/ how important is having the swedish suffix in the url with regards to rankings in Sweden?" I find these questions really challenging, its like the Hey if i change this url my SEO problems will be fixed, as if its that easy. So my question is - "How weighted is the url suffix / ccTLD in terms of SEO success for a territory / country" Put another way "If the swedish suffix .se was removed would it impact rankings in any way in Sweden?" Grazie tanto,
Algorithm Updates | | Nightwing
David0 -
Question regarding research tools
The keyword analysis tool on seomoz is currently down. Are there are any other trustworthy tools I can use?
Algorithm Updates | | uofmiamiguy0 -
Question relates to mobile site & duplicate content.
We are working on the mobile version of a large site (migraine.com) and will be using a separate theme for it (directing visitors to m.migraine.com)- what are the necessary code or other important step we should take so that we do get penalized for having duplicate content? Thank you in advance for your responses
Algorithm Updates | | OlivierChateau0