Sitemap Best Practices
-
My question is regarding the URL structure best practices of a sitemap. My website allows search any number of ways, i.e.
1. http://www.website.com/category/subcategory/product
2. http://www.website.com/subcategory/product
3. http://www.website.com/product
However, I am not sure which structure to use in the sitemap (which is being written manually). I know that for SEO purposes the 3rd option is best as the link is more relevant to that individual product, but the Moz tool states that the home page should have less than 100 links (although Google doesn't penalise for having more) and by writing my entire site in the 3rd way it would result in a lot more links adjoining to the home page.
It is either the 2nd or 3rd option, I think, as the 1st category is not keyword specific (rather a generic term, i.e. novelties).
Does anyone have experience with this?
-
Happy to help!
-
Thanks Logan!
-
Google is less concerned about the actual structure of your URLs, and more concerned that you pick a horse and ride it, which you've done by canonicalizing 2 variations to the third. In your example, the third URL is perfectly fine, since it will always remain constant. The other 2 can change depending on how someone navigates to that product. I'd keep it the way you have it.
-
Hello Logan, thanks for responding, although you've not responded to my actual question as such.
Yes, currently I am canonicalising links 1 and 2 toward link 3, but my question wasn't regarding which URL to use in the sitemap, but rather what Googles preferred URL structure was.
Does Google dislike the link 3 structure because it makes it links every product and category directly to the home page? It would appear that the Moz tool seems to think so (although they state that you're not penalised for it).
In your experience, what is Googles preferred URL structure, link 1, 2 or 3? I can easily change the Canonical tag to either of the three, that isn't an issue.
-
Hi,
In your example, you have 3 URLs that render the same content it sounds like. If this is the case, I would assume you're canonicalizing 2 versions to the third. In this situation, you'd want to use the canonical version in your XML sitemaps. You don't want to point search engines to URLs in a XML sitemap then have them go elsewhere when they find the canonical tag.
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
-
What is the best way to treat URLs ending in /?s=
Hi community, I'm going through the list of crawl errors visible in my MOZ dashboard and there's a few URLs ending in /?s= How should I treat these URLs? Redirects? Thanks for any help
Moz Pro | | Easigrass0 -
Best tools for an initial website health check?
Hi,
Moz Pro | | CamperConnect14
I'd like to offer free website health checks (basic audits) and am wondering what tools other people use for this? It would be good to use something that presents the data well. Moz is great but it gets expensive if I want to offer these to many businesses in the hope of taking on just a few as clients and doing a full manual audit for them. So far I've tried seositecheckup.com (just checks a single page though), metaforensics.io and mysiteauditor. Thanks!0 -
Best Way to Seemlessly Use Moz and Google Analytics
Hi All, I have Moz Pro and I am beginning to explore Moz Analytics. I currently use Google Analytics for pretty much everything and I am almost at expert level at using the GA interface so I'm ready to learn a new tool and have a second source of data! My question is: what's the best way to get the most of Moz Analytics and GA congruently? Off hand I know that Moz's keyword, rank, and link data, including competitive insights, is more comprehensive than GA. But how else can I use Moz and get the most out of the Moz Analytics? Looking to really dive in and discuss how we can make use of both! Thanks - Vee
Moz Pro | | Symmetri0 -
Best Chrome extension to find contact emails on a website
Hi, I've done some digging around the Q and A and SEOMoz articles. Still not finding exactly what I need. I'm just looking for a tool that will quickly help me find the best contact email on a particular website. Whether it be the one the site is registered to a different one or both. Thanks in advance for the help. Aaron
Moz Pro | | arkana0 -
What is the Best Local Ranking Tool?
I'm trying to track down a tool that will provide localized rankings within Google Maps/Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local as well as major local directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. Additionally, I'm looking for the results to provide the address being displayed in the ranking. Any suggestions?
Moz Pro | | JonClark150 -
Best Keyword Difficulty Tool?
Hi All, I'm a bit frustrated with the fact that I can only enter 5 words at a time into SEOmoz's keyword difficulty tool. Does anyone know of a better way (or tool) to analyze keyword difficulty for hundreds of keywords?
Moz Pro | | nicole.healthline0 -
Best way to defeat negative press?
Hi there, One big reason my non profit hired me to tackle SEO for our site is that there is currently a lot of negative stuff out there right now about us. There was a lot of stuff that went down in the past, and currently Googling different names of our org's members, or typing in variations of our name, brings up several sites that are negative and inflammatory. They have been up since the early 2000's, so they have that advantage over us. It's interesting because I'm sort of in a position where I'm doing SEO for the sake of doing SEO, which is sort of cool because I get to learn a lot. We don't really have conversion KPIs or anything, but I'm sure that will come in time. I suppose my question is, what is the best way to tackle this? I mean I know that overall doing great SEO will help, but I'm wondering if there's a specific practice I should be focusing on to defeat a ton of negative stuff that has age over us. I'm also concerned that even if we get our site listed #1 for various searches, there will still be the negative stuff on page 1, just lower ranked. Any thoughts? Thanks for your time!
Moz Pro | | MikeQ-BACC0 -
Best Tool to Build List of Competitor's Top Keywords?
What is the best (hopefully seomoz) tool to create a list of the keywords bringing the most traffic into a competitor's website? Goal is to build a list of keywords that bring the competitor the most traffic, stack ranked by volume of traffic coming into the competitor.
Moz Pro | | sftravel1