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
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • 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.

    What is your Brand Authority?
    Moz

    What is your Brand Authority?

    Check yours now
  • 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.

    • SEO Q&A

      Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • 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.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • 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
          • topic:timeago_earlier,5 years
          • 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

                  • McTaggart

                    Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?

                    Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 4, 2015, 7:02 AM | McTaggart
                    0
                  • ChrisHolgate

                    Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?

                    We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
                    I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 1, 2015, 5:10 PM | ChrisHolgate
                    1
                  • DavidC.

                    Do you suggest I use the Yoast or the Google XML sitemap for my blog?

                    I just shut off the All-In-One seo pack plugin for wordpress, and turned on the Yoast plugin. It's great!  So much helpful, seo boosting info! So, in watching a video on how to configure the plugin, it mentions that I should update the sitemap, using the Yoast sitemap I'm afraid to do this, because I'm pretty technologically behind... I see I have a Google XML Sitemaps (by Arne Brachhold) plugin turned on (and have had it for many years). Should I leave this one on? Or would you recommend going through the steps to use the Yoast plugin sitemap? If so, what are the benefits of the Yoast plugin, over the Google XML? Thanks!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 29, 2015, 9:50 PM | DavidC.
                    0
                  • seo.owl

                    How to handle a blog subdomain on the main sitemap and robots file?

                    Hi, I have some confusion about how our blog subdomain is handled in our sitemap.  We have our main website, example.com, and our blog, blog.example.com. Should we list the blog subdomain URL in our main sitemap?  In other words, is listing a subdomain allowed in the root sitemap? What does the final structure look like in terms of the sitemap and robots file?  Specifically: **example.com/sitemap.xml ** would I include a link to our blog subdomain (blog.example.com)? example.com/robots.xml would I include a link to BOTH our main sitemap and blog sitemap? blog.example.com/sitemap.xml would I include a link to our main website URL (even though it's not a subdomain)? blog.example.com/robots.xml does a subdomain need its own robots file? I'm a technical SEO and understand the mechanics of much of on-page SEO.... but for some reason I never found an answer to this specific question and I am wondering how the pros do it.  I appreciate your help with this.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 21, 2014, 3:35 PM | seo.owl
                    0
                  • WMCA

                    XML Sitemap on another domain

                    Hi, We've rebuilt our website and created a better sitemap index structure. There's a good chance that we not be able to append the XML files to existing site for technical reasons (don't get me started). I'm reaching out because I'm wondering if can we place the XML files on another website or subdomain? I know this is not best practice and probably very grey but I'm looking for alternatives. If there answer is DON'T DO IT let me know too. Thx

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 30, 2013, 1:24 AM | WMCA
                    0
                  • theLotter

                    302 redirects in the sitemap?

                    My website uses a prefix at the end to instruct the back-end about visitor details. The setup is similar to this site - http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf with a 302 redirect from the normal link to the one with additional info and a canonical tag on the actual URL without the extra info ((the normal one here being http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com,) However, when I used www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a sitemap they did so using the URLs with the extra info on the links... what should I do to create a sitemap using the normal URLs (which are the ones I want to be promoting)

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 7, 2013, 10:46 AM | theLotter
                    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
                  • iAnalyst.com

                    Create a new XML Sitemap for a blog subdomain?

                    What would be the best way to go about this? A site just put a blog on http://blog.domain.com/ Should there be a separate XML Sitemap for that particular subdomain or should the original XML Sitemap for the main domain be sufficient? Looking forward to your responses. Thanks

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 4, 2011, 3:16 PM | iAnalyst.com
                    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
                  • 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.