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
-
I have a sitemap.php on my sites. The file contains the php code which generates my xml sitemap. It is perfectly standard and common practice.
The question for your programmer is, where is the output xml file located? A sitemap program will output the file to the same location each time it is updated. He should be able to provide you a link to the file.
I would advise the URL to be placed somewhere like mydomain.com/sitemap directory. If a deeper directory is preferred, then add the location to robots.txt. Either way it cannot hurt to update the sitemap in Google WMT. With that said, it is not necessary to do so as long as you can confirm Google is getting the information.
-
I haven't seen a sitemap.php in a long time, Sha. Certainly Google could read it if they want, but whether they will or not is the question. I would be inclined to doubt it.
If he says that it's generating a sitemap.xml, but none is present on WMT, then I would respond that one of two things is happening:
1. It isn't generating the sitemap in an xml format at all, but only in php, or
2. For some reason, the xml version is either not transmitted, or not received.
The only other possibility that comes to mind is that perhaps the conversion from php to xml is not tagged in a fashion to be recognized as an xml file, and WMT is detecting it as php and assigning it that status accordingly. I suppose that could happen, particularly if he is using an outdated plugin or if of his own coding, the conversion is faulty.
I'd be interested in hearing what you ultimately learn on this.
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
-
Crawl Diagnostics: Duplicate Content Issues
The Moz crawl diagnostic is showing that I have some duplicate content issues on my site. For the most part, these are variations of the same product that are listed individually (i.e size/color). What would be the best way to deal with this? Choose one variation of the product and add a canonical tag? Thanks
Technical SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Is it important to include image files in your sitemap?
I run an ecommerce business that has over 4000 product pages which, as you can imagine, branches off into thousands of image files. Is it necessary to include those in my sitemap for faster indexing? Thanks for you help! -Reed
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Host sitemaps on S3?
Hey guys, I run a dynamic web service and I will start building static sitemaps for it pretty soon. The fact that my app lives in a multitude of servers doesn't make it easy to distribute frequently updated static files throughout the servers. My idea was to host the files in AWS S3 and point my robots.txt sitemap directive there. I'll use a sitemap index so, every other sitemap will be hosted on S3 as well. I could dynamically mirror the content from the files in S3 through my app, but that would be a little more resource intensive than just serving the static files from a common place. Any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tanlup0 -
Best XML Sitemap Generator for Mac?
Hi all, Recently moved from PC to Mac when starting a new job. One of the things I'm missing from my PC is G Site Crawler, and I haven't yet found a decent equivalent for the Mac. Can anybody recommend something as good as G Site Crawler for the Mac? I.e. I need the flexibility to exclude by URL parameter etc etc. Cheers everyone, Mark
Technical SEO | | markadoi840 -
Image Sitemap Indexing Issue
Hello Folks, I've been running into some strange issues with our XML Sitemaps. The XML Sitemaps won't open on a browser and it throws the following error instead of opening the XML Sitemap. Sample XML Sitemap - www.veer.com/sitemap/images/Sitemap0.xml.gzError - "XML Parsing Error: no element foundLocation: http://www.veer.com/sitemap/images/Sitemap0.xmlLine Number 1, Column 1:"2) Image files are not getting indexed. For instance, the sitemap - www.veer.com/sitemap/images/Sitemap0.xml.gz has 6,000 URLs and 6,000 Images. However, only 3,481 URLs and 25 images are getting indexed. The sitemap formatting seems good, but I can't figure out why Google's de-indexing the images and only 50-60% of the URLs are getting indexed. Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | CorbisVeer0 -
Htaccess issue
I have some urls in my site due to a rating counter. These are like: domain.com/?score=4&rew=25
Technical SEO | | sesertin
domain.com/?score=1&rew=28
domain.com/?score=5&rew=95 These are all duplicate content to my homepage and I want to 301 redirect them there. I tried so far: RedirectMatch 301 /[a-z]score[a-z] http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 /.score. http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 /^score$.* http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 /.^score$.* http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 /[a-z]score[a-z] http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 score http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 /[.]score[.] http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 /[.]score[.] http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 /[a-z,0-9]score[a-z,0-9] http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 /[a-z,0-9,=,&]score[a-z,0-9,=,&] http://domain.com
RedirectMatch 301 /[a-z,0-9,=&?/.]score[a-z,0-9,=&] http://domain.com None of them works. Anybody? Solution? Would be very much appriciated0 -
On-Site Sitemaps - Guidance Required
Hi, I am looking to find good examples of on-site sitemaps. We already submit our XML sitemap regularly through GWMT but I now wonder if we still need an on-site sitemap, as we have about 30 static pages and 300+ Wordpress blogs which in a sense makes that a spammy page as it has too many links and a higher than average keyword density. The reason I am looking for good examples is that I want to create a basic on-site sitemap that aids navigation but is styled to look ok as well. The Solution I have in mind: mydomain.com/link-example-one.php
Technical SEO | | tdsnet
mydomain.com/link-example-two.php
mydomain.com/liink-example-ten.php mydomain.com/blog then links to my 300 WP blogs, broken down into chunks navigated by using breadcrumbs. Will Google crawl this ok or should I stick to the current format listing ALL posts on one page? Thanks0 -
Duplicate content issues caused by our CMS
Hello fellow mozzers, Our in-house CMS - which is usually good for SEO purposes as it allows all the control over directories, filenames, browser titles etc that prevent unwieldy / meaningless URLs and generic title tags - seems to have got itself into a bit of a tiz when it comes to one of our clients. We have tried solving the problem to no avail, so I thought I'd throw it open and see if anyone has a soultion, or whether it's just a fault in our CMS. Basically, the SEs are indexing two identical pages, one ending with a / and the other ending /index.php, for one of our sites (www.signature-care-homes.co.uk). We have gone through the site and made sure the links all point to just one of these, and have done the same for off-site links, but there is still the duplicate content issue of both versions getting indexed. We also set up an htaccess file to redirect to the chosen version, but to no avail, and we're not sure canonical will work for this issue as / pages should redirect to /index.php anyway - and that's we can't work out. We have set the access file to point to index.php, and that should be what should be happening anyway, but it isn't. Is there an alternative way of telling the SE's to only look at one of these two versions? Also, we are currently rewriting the content and changing the structure - will this change the situation we find ourselves in?
Technical SEO | | themegroup0