Domain restructure, sitemaps and indexing
-
I've got a handcoded site with around 1500 unique articles and a handcoded sitemap. Very old school.
The url structure is a bit of a mess, so to make things easier for a developer who'll be making the site database-driven, I thought I'd recategorise the content. Same content, but with new url structure (I thought I'd juice up the urls for SEO purposes while I was at it)
To this end, I took categories like:
/body/amazing-big-shoes/
/style/red-boots/
/technology/cyber-boots/And rehoused all the content like so, doing it all manually with ftp:
/boots/amazing-boots/
/boots/red-boots/
/boots/cyber-boots/I placed 301 redirects in the .htaccess file like so:
redirect 301 /body/amazing-boots/ http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/
(not doing redirects for each article, just for categories which seemed to make the articles redirect nicely.)
Then I went into sitemap.xml and manually overwrote all the entries to reflect the new url structure, but keeping the old dates of the original entries, like so:
<url><loc>http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/index.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>And resubmitted the sitemap to Google Webmasters.
This was done 4 days ago. Webmaster said that the 1400 of 1500 articles indexed had dropped to 860, and today it's climbed to 939.
Did I adopt correct procedure? Am I going about things the right way? Given a little time, can I expect Google to re-index the new pages nicely?
I appreciate I've made a lot of changes in one fell swoop which could be a bit of a no-no... ?
PS Apologies if this question appears twice on Q&A - hopefully I haven't double-posted
-
If your developer will be making the website dynamic via a system like WordPress there will be automated ways to keep your sitemap up to date every time you publish a new page to your system and then it will even ping the search engines that the sitemap is updated It will be a "set it and forget it" type of thing with sitemaps if you are moving in that direction
Good luck!
-
Oh, no what you did is perfect! I guess I meant the site architecture/navigation, but you answered it in your original post when you said "Same content" so disregard that question. Congrats.
-
Sadly I did change the internal linking structure, so that internal links now point to new urls not the old ones. The good news is that even with changing the internal linking structure, Google seems to be keeping abreast of it all. The number of urls indexed has now jumped - in a day - from 939 to 1024, so good old Google is clearly keeping up with the changes. Looks like my fears were ungrounded. Yay
-
Looks perfect to me too. Did the internal linking structure change at all or is that still the same? If it's all the same you should be right back where you were in no time. And you should see some benefits from having a more common sense, easy to understand URL structure. Cheers!
-
That's fair. I get that you're not recommending it personally - but it does seem popular with consistently good feedback from people, so I'll give it a go
-
Just to clarify, I know the sitemap tool I mentioned is very popular. Many small sites use it because it is online, fast and free. I have used it a few times myself. I can't necessarily say I recommend it because I have never personally purchased the software. I would say that if I was looking to obtain a sitemap for your site, I would start with that tool but may take a look at some others.
-
Thanks Ryan, that's a weight off my mind. I'll definitely take up your advice on the sitemap generator, too. Thanks for the recommendation - I'd seen a few around, but wasn't sure - it's great to be pointed in the right direction!
-
Did I adopt correct procedure? Am I going about things the right way? Given a little time, can I expect Google to re-index the new pages nicely?
I would say Yes to all three, but clarify with details below.
When you submit a sitemap to Google with 1500 pages, there is no guarantee they will index all of your pages. It sounds like you have done a lot of intensive, manual work. Fortunately, you have done things the correct way in properly redirecting each page to the new URL. If Google indexed 1400 pages before, they should index around that same number once again. It may take several weeks depending on a few factors such as your site's Domain Authority, navigation and how many links each page has received.
With respect to the sitemap, I would highly recommend using sitemap generation software. It is simply not reasonable to manually update a sitemap with 1500 entries. I would have updated the lastmod date on the sitemap but it may not make any difference.
A popular sitemap tool: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. The free version only generates 500 pages, but for $20 you can buy the full version and automate it.
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 my page being indexed?
To put you all in context, here is the situation, I have pages that are only accessible via an intern search tool that shows the best results for the request. Let's say i want to see the result on page 2, the page 2 will have a request in the url like this: ?p=2&s=12&lang=1&seed=3688 The situation is that we've disallowed every URL's that contains a "?" in the robots.txt file which means that Google doesn't crawl the page 2,3,4 and so on. If a page is only accessible via page 2, do you think Google will be able to access it? The url of the page is included in the sitemap. Thank you in advance for the help!
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
Sitemap
I have a question for the links in a sitemap. Wordpress works with a sitemap that first link to the different kind of pages: pagesitemap.xml categorysitemap.xml productsitemap.xml etc. etc. These links on the first page are clickable. We have a website that also links to the different pages but it's not clickable, just a flat link. Is this an issue?
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO0 -
Domain not ranking in Google
https://www.buitenspeelgoed.nl/ is a domain acquired by our client. Previously this website was on http://www.buitenspeelgoed-keupink.nl. With the old domain they were ranking top 30 on 'buitenspeelgoed' in google.nl. Now with the new exact match domain they aren't ranking any more (for months). However, the website is indexed, as you can see on http://1l1.be/nz I don't know what to do anymore. Need some advise. What we allready have done the last months: made adjustments to the 301-redirects (this was originaly setup wrong by the webdesigner (de) optimized the homepage on 'buitenspeelgoed' (strange is the fact that the Moz robot can't access the site). Checked the robots.txt to see if the website was blocked for Google Checked the meta robots to see if the website was blocked for Google Disavowed some spammy (old) links which linked to the old domain Checked Search console > Fetch as Google if there isn't any Malware of some kind (and to see if Google can access the site) Checked Search consol to see if there manual spam actions (isn't the case) Checked for duplicate content by copy/paste some texts in Google and see if any other results are showing up (isn't the case for most of the texts) Please let me know what we can do.
Technical SEO | | InventusOnline0 -
Sitemap url's not being indexed
There is an issue on one of our sites regarding many of the sitemap url's not being indexed. (at least 70% is not being indexed) The url's in the sitemap are normal url's without any strange characters attached to them, but after looking into it, it seems a lot of the url's get a #. + a number sequence attached to them once you actually go to that url. We are not sure if the "addthis" bookmark could cause this, or if it's another script doing it. For example Url in the sitemap: http://example.com/example-category/0246 Url once you actually go to that link: http://example.com/example-category/0246#.VR5a Just for further information, the XML file does not have any style information associated with it and is in it's most basic form. Has anyone had similar issues with their sitemap not being indexed properly ?...Could this be the cause of many of these url's not being indexed ? Thanks all for your help.
Technical SEO | | GreenStone0 -
Sitemap issue
How can I create XML as well as HTML sitemaps for my website (both eCommerce and non - eCommerce )Is there any script or tool that helps me making perfect sitemapPlease suggest
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Domain vs Sub Domain and Rankings
Hi All Wanting some advice. I have a client which has a number of individual centres that are part of an umbrella organisation. Each individual centre has its own web site and some of these sites have similar (not duplicate content) products and services. Currently the individual centres are sub domains of the umbrella organisation. i.e. Umbrella organisation www.organisation.org.au Individual centres are sub domains i.e. www.centre1.organisation.org.au, www.centre2.organisation.org.au etc. I'm feeling that perhaps this setup might be affecting the rankings of the individual sites because they are sub domains. Would love to hear some thoughts or experience on this and whether its worth going through the process of migrating the individual centre domains. Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Migrating domains from a domain that will have new content.
We have a new url. The old url is being taken over by someone else. Is it possible to still have a successful redirect/migration strategy if we are redirect from our old domain, which is now being used by someone else. I see a big mess, but I'm being told we can redirect all the links to our old content (which is now used by someone else) to our new url. Thoughts? craziness? insanity? Or I'm just not getting it:)
Technical SEO | | CC_Dallas0 -
No index directory pages?
All, I have a site built on WordPress with directory software (edirectory) on the backend that houses a directory of members. The Wordpress portion of the site is full of content and drives traffic through to the directory. Like most directories, the results pages are thin on content and mainly contain links to member profiles. Is it best to simply no index the search results for the directory portion of the site?
Technical SEO | | JSOC0