Hey,

The reason is that I want to no index the actual .xml file because it causes a 404 error in Google Web Master Tools.

Hey,

How can I tell search engines not to index my xml RSS feed?

The RSS feed is created by Yoast on WordPress.

Thanks, Luke.

Hey Paul,

The above code can be placed between and as stated above. If yur website is built in php then you can just copy and paste it above.

Please have a look here http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

For the canonical you want to use Yoast if your on a WordPress site.

If not add this between and (php is required)

" />

Here's the link http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Hey,

Never used All-in-one SEO but we do use and recommend the Yoast plugin for WordPress. Take a look at it

Hey Paul,

I'm not to sure on what your asking at some parts of this question.

Are you looking for a, b and c to be explain or an example?

If you have access to the .htaccess file on your server you can use this website http://www.htaccessredirect.net/ to generate content for it. The redirect directory should do it.

If not the you can use php to create a 301 redirect like so

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
header("Location: http://www.New-Website.com/test.php");?>

and the final option would be to email your hosting company and ask them to do it.

Have a look at this Screaming Frog

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Its one of the best tools to use for creating sitemaps in our opinion.

Oops thanks for all you answers, but what i should have said is: Is having "/index.php/" half way through the URI like so

"http://www.example.com/someuri/index.php/more_uri/"

bad for SEO/UX?

To clarify if one searched on Google for more_uri and everything else was equal would the index.php in the middle of that URI be damaging to the ranking?

Sorry about that

OK thanks, so index.php won't effect the SEO results. But not redirecting it, as both /index.php and / work correctly and go to the same php file, will result in the same content being registered twice by Google I'm guessing?

Is it bad for SEO if traffic is directed to "http://www.example.com/someuri/index.php" instead of "http://www.example.com/someuri/" and would it be works setting up a redirect rule at htaccess level?

I'd go for the latter "mydomain.com/blog", then any links built to your awesome content will be on the same sub-domain as the rest of your content. Works wonders.

Thanks Big Bazza... I like the 'better' vs 'accepted' reasoning. Not too confrontational

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.