undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Multilingual Sitemaps

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Multilingual Sitemaps

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
4
8
18.9k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • Angelos_Savvaidis
    Angelos_Savvaidis last edited by Feb 25, 2015, 3:34 PM

    Hey there, I have a site with many languages. So here are my questions concerning the sitemaps. The correct way of creating a sitemap for a multilingual site is as followed ( by the official blog of Google )

    <urlset xmlns="</span>http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

    http://www.example.com/loc>

    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="</span>http://www.example.com/"/>

    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="</span>http://www.example.com/de"/>

    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="</span>http://www.example.com/fr"/><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" fr"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" de"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"="" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></urlset>

    **So here is my first question. My site has over 200.000 pages that all of them support around 5-6 languages. Am I suppose to do this example 200.000 times?****My second question is. My root domain is www.example.com but this one redirects with 301 to www.example.com/en should the sitemap be at ****www.example.com/sitemap.xmlorwww.example.com/en/sitemap.xml ???****My third question is as followed. On WMT do I submit my sitemap in all versions of my site? I have all my languages there.**Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond to this thread and by creating it I hope many people will solve their own questions.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • kirstybethkb
      kirstybethkb last edited by Oct 4, 2019, 5:07 AM Oct 4, 2019, 5:07 AM

      Thank you so much for replying to me.

      Sorry I’ve just realise I’ve made a mistake in my first comment. We are using .com for our main site and we plan to add subfolders for individual countries in the future. Currently, we only have /row for all the countries outside of the UK that we deliver to.

      Thanks again for getting back!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • katemorris
        katemorris @kirstybethkb last edited by Oct 1, 2019, 2:11 PM Oct 1, 2019, 2:11 PM

        Ah, yes! If you have multiple locations, but the same content in each location you would want to submit a sitemap per country-specific area. However, is your domain on .co.uk? If you are trying to target other countries that are not the UK with that ccTLD, you are going to have a hard time as that is specific to the UK.

        However, if you are on a gTLD (general domain), and have country-specific folders, you should have a sitemap per country.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • kirstybethkb
          kirstybethkb @katemorris last edited by Oct 1, 2019, 11:15 AM Oct 1, 2019, 11:09 AM

          GHi Kate,

          Does your advice on points 2 and 3 also apply to location targeted subfolders? We have a separate subfolder for all of the countries we deliver to outside of the UK at www.example.co.uk/row however the content is in the same language from our uk site.

          We have claimed this as a separate property on Google Search Console.

          I realise it’s years later but hopefully someone is able to answer this query 🙂

          I did read your article https://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic but wasn’t sure if it is the same when trying to target specific countries with a subfolder.

          Thanks in advance.

          katemorris 1 Reply Last reply Oct 1, 2019, 2:11 PM Reply Quote 0
          • katemorris
            katemorris last edited by Feb 28, 2015, 1:09 AM Feb 28, 2015, 1:09 AM

            Thanks for the shout out Ryan!

            Hi Angelos.

            1. The short answer is yes, you should do all of those entries. Annoying right?

            The best way to go about this is going to be writing a script to do the heavy lifting, but I am not cool enough to tell you how to do that. The idea would be to make one sitemap in one language, and if the URLs are identical except for the language code, then changing up everything for the next language and moving on one at a time.

            You should have one main sitemap per language if you can get all of your content into one sitemap. Then have one sitemap index hosted at domain.com/sitemap.xml.

            If that's not possible due to the sheer number of pages, do a sitemap index per language that references multiple sitemaps to cover the content in that one language. Then have another sitemap index that references the other indices per language.

            2.  See above. The main sitemap index should be at domain.com/sitemap.xml, BUT you can have each language sitemap hosted in each subfolder. Example: English sitemap at domain.com/en/sitemap.xml and Spanish sitemap at domain.com/es/sitemap.xml. This requires listing many sitemaps in the main robots.txt file or having a robots file for each subfolder. It's a lot more work than working with sitemap indices.

            3. If you have claimed all language subfolders as independent sites in WMT, you can submit the corresponding sitemap. You don't have to put the sitemaps in the subfolders to do this though, you can still use the indices. You also don't have to submit them all individually, but you can and I would as I would want to see the index information in each corresponding account. That's just me though.

            Does that all help?

            kirstybethkb 1 Reply Last reply Oct 1, 2019, 11:09 AM Reply Quote 1
            • RyanPurkey
              RyanPurkey @Angelos_Savvaidis last edited by Feb 25, 2015, 4:55 PM Feb 25, 2015, 4:55 PM

              Per Google's recommendations here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en, yes you want to have pages correctly tagged with their alternate language translations. Per the blog I cited earlier, you'll want to organize the sitemaps to break out the 200.000 pages in a structure that's more refined than just 'all', specifically in ways that will help you find if there are problems creeping up in one section or another. Good luck!

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Angelos_Savvaidis
                Angelos_Savvaidis @RyanPurkey last edited by Feb 25, 2015, 4:45 PM Feb 25, 2015, 4:45 PM

                It is indeed a great article but certainly does not answer any of my questions 🙂 ( or i havent read the article correct )

                My first question is: Do i have to do this

                <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

                <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/"/>

                <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" de"="" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/de"/>

                <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" fr"="" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/fr"/></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link>

                for all my 200.000 + sitemap pages?

                Thanks Ryan for taking the time to answer 🙂

                RyanPurkey 1 Reply Last reply Feb 25, 2015, 4:55 PM Reply Quote 0
                • RyanPurkey
                  RyanPurkey last edited by Feb 25, 2015, 4:12 PM Feb 25, 2015, 4:12 PM

                  Kate Morris wrote a nice post on how to break up sitemaps for large sites a few years ago, but it still holds true today: http://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic, so following the advice there should help on your first question.

                  Your 301 redirect to English should probably be a 302 and based on browser language settings.  Is it possible for anyone to get to a file or folder at www.example.com/whatever...?

                  Third, see the blog mentioned above. She gets into the details of how to create an Index format for your soon to be many sitemaps.  Cheers!

                  Angelos_Savvaidis 1 Reply Last reply Feb 25, 2015, 4:45 PM Reply Quote 1
                  • 1 / 1
                  1 out of 8
                  • First post
                    1/8
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • TyEl

                    XML sitemap generator only crawling 20% of my site

                    Hi guys, I am trying to submit the most recent XML sitemap but the sitemap generator tools are only crawling about 20% of my site.  The site carries around 150 pages and only 37 show up on tools like xml-sitemaps.com. My goal is to get all the important URLs we care about into the XML sitemap. How should I go about this? Thanks

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 20, 2023, 12:08 PM | TyEl
                    0
                  • McTaggart

                    Sitemap with homepage URL repeated several times - it is a problem?

                    Hello Mozzers, I am looking at a website with the homepage repeated several times (4 times) on the sitemap (sitemap is autogenerated via a plugin) - is this an SEO problem do you think - might it damage SEO performance, or can I ignore this issue? I am thinking I can ignore, yet it's an odd "issue" so your advice would be welcome! Thanks, Luke

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 26, 2016, 12:02 PM | McTaggart
                    0
                  • Jonathan.Smith

                    Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?

                    I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 10, 2016, 11:17 PM | Jonathan.Smith
                    0
                  • edlondon

                    Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images

                    Hi Mozzers, We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed. The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT.  If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are. The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'.  That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt.  As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt. There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml. Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in.  Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load. To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1. Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change.  But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact.  The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed? The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue. Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this.  I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough. Thank you for taking the time to read and help. Regards, Mark Oz6HzKO rYD3ICZ

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 19, 2014, 8:51 AM | edlondon
                    0
                  • PedroM

                    Tool to check XML sitemap

                    Hello, Can anyone help me finding a tool to have closer look of the XML sitemap? Tks in advance! PP

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 9, 2012, 6:03 PM | PedroM
                    0
                  • msquare

                    Submitting URLs multiple times in different sitemaps

                    We have a very dynamic site, with a large number of pages. We use a sitemap index file, that points to several smaller sitemap files. The question is: Would there be any issue if we include the same URL in multiple sitemap files? Scenario: URL1 appears on sitemap1. 2 weeks later, the page at URL1 changes and we'd like to update it on a sitemap. Would it be acceptable to add URL1 as an entry in sitemap2?  Would there be any issues with the same URL appearing multiple times? Thanks.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 1, 2012, 11:35 PM | msquare
                    0
                  • NoisyLittleMonkey

                    Sitemaps. When compressed do you use the .gz file format or the (untidy looking, IMHO) .xml.gz format?

                    When submitting compressed sitemaps to Google I normally use the a file named sitemap.gz A customer is banging on that his web guy says that sitemap.xml.gz is a better format. Google spiders sitemap.gz just fine and in Webmaster Tools everything looks OK... Interested to know other SEOmoz Pro's preferences here and also to check I haven't made an error that is going to bite me in the ass soon! Over to you.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 18, 2011, 7:44 AM | NoisyLittleMonkey
                    0
                  • rhysmaster

                    Online Sitemap Generator

                    I have a site that has around 5,000 pages now. Are there any recommened online free/paid tools to generate a sitemap for me?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 18, 2014, 6:27 PM | rhysmaster
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.