Sitemap.xml - autogenerated by CMS is full of crud
-
Hi all,
hope you can help.
the Magento ecommerce system I'm working with autogenerates sitemap.xml - it's well formed with priority and frequency parameters.
However, it has generated lots of URLs that are pointing to broken pages returning fatal erros, duplicate URLs (not canonicals), 404s etc
I'm thinking of hand creating sitemap.xml - the site has around 50 main pages including products and categories, and I can get the main page URLs listed by screaming frog or xenu.
Then I'll have to get into the hand editing the crud pages with noindex, and useful duplicates with canonicals.
Is this the way to go or is there another solution
thanks in advance for any advice
-
If the cron is working then I would personally turn to the other forum to see if anyone knows a way to rope those messy URLs in and get them under control. I try to avoid manually generating and updating sitemaps whenever I can, because it's a hassle on a small site, not to mention the trouble on an ecommerce site.
If your site is going to stay that small, then a manual sitemap might be less of a headache for you than customizing Magento.
I would worry about keeping a clean sitemap. If the search engines learn that you keep a messy sitemap, they will rely on it less and less. 404 & 500 codes especially, but also redirects and perhaps duplicate content.
For Further Reading:
Google Sitemaps Ask For Clean URLs - http://www.johnfdoherty.com/google-sitemaps-ask-for-clean-urls/
-
Hi Kane,
the sitemap is new - it's just that Magento create lots of duplicate files on the fly & it's not putting the canonical URLs in the sitemap etc.
I just wondered whether its worth hand creating a sitemap.xml containing the content pages (60 or 70 of them) for this relatively small site, or not worry too much about the sitemap, the site is pretty well indexed by google already
I'll head over to the Magento forums again to see if I can find more info
many thanks for you help
-
If it's returning 404 pages, that sounds like a dated sitemap. Have you activated the cron service?
See the "Refreshing Sitemaps at Regular Intervals" section of this page if not:
Magento can be set up to automatically refresh Google Sitemaps at regular intervals. This function is configured in Admin > System > Configuration > Google Sitemap.
To use Magento’s automatic generation of Google Sitemaps, you must activate the Magento Cron service.
If you do have that setup, and you're certain it's working correctly, then I would turn to the forums at MagentoCommerce.com - you're going to get a lot faster answer there since everyone is familiar with that exact platform.
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
-
Which product URL to include in Sitemaps?
Hi Does the product URL's in Sitemaps affect the sub-categories authority too? For example, if I have a product with 2 URL's and which have a canonical tag: **/brands/michael-kors/bags/**jet-set-double-zip-wallet/ **/women/accessories/wallets/**jet-set-double-zip-wallet/ If I make the main URL "/women/accessories/wallets/jet-set-double-zip-wallet/" and set that as the Canonical URL & list that URL in the XML Sitemap, will it also mean the "/women/accessories/wallets/" category will get more authority and increase it's power to rank? Thanks Frankie
Technical SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Is there a maximum sitemap size?
Hi all, Over the last month we've included all images, videos, etc. into our sitemap and now its loading time is rather high. (http://www.troteclaser.com/sitemap.xml) Is there any maximum sitemap size that is recommended from Google?
Technical SEO | | Troteclaser0 -
Sitemap indexed pages dropping
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits0 -
Sitemap as Referrer in Crawl Error Report
I have just downloaded the SEOMoz crawl error report, and I have a number of pages listed which all show FALSE. The only common denominator is the referrer - the sitemap. I can't find anything wrong, should I be worried this is appearing in the error report?
Technical SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Removing Redirected URLs from XML Sitemap
If I'm updating a URL and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL, Google recommends I remove the old URL from our XML sitemap and add the new URL. That makes sense. However, can anyone speak to how Google transfers the ranking value (link value) from the old URL to the new URL? My suspicion is this happens outside the sitemap. If Google already has the old URL indexed, the next time it crawls that URL, Googlebot discovers the 301 redirect and that starts the process of URL value transfer. I guess my question revolves around whether removing the old URL (or the timing of the removal) from the sitemap can impact Googlebot's transfer of the old URL value to the new URL.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
What to include on a sitemap for a huge site?
I have a very large site and I'm not sure what all to include on the sitemap page. We have categories such as items1, items2 and in the items1 category are 100 vendors with their individual vendor pages. Should I link all 100 vendor pages on the sitemap or just the main items1 category?
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
URL restructure and phasing out HTML sitemap
Hi SEOMozzies, Love the Q&A resource and already found lots of useful stuff too! I just started as an in-house SEO at a retailer and my first main challenge is to tidy up the complex URL structures and remove the ugly sub sitemap approach currently used. I already found a number of suggestions but it looks like I am dealing with a number of challenges that I need to resolve in a single release. So here is the current setup: The website is an ecommerce site (department store) with around 30k products. We are using multi select navigation (non Ajax). The main website uses a third party search engine to power the multi select navigation, that search engine has a very ugly URL structure. For example www.domain.tld/browse?location=1001/brand=100/color=575&size=1&various other params, or for multi select URL’s www.domain.tld/browse?location=1001/brand=100,104,506/color=575&size=1 &various other non used URL params. URL’s are easily up to 200 characters long and non-descriptive at all to our users. Many of these type of URL’s are indexed by search engines (we currently have 1.2 million of those URL’s indexed including session id’s and all other nasty URL params) Next to this the site is using a “sub site” that is sort of optimized for SEO, not 100% sure this is cloaking but it smells like it. It has a simplified navigation structure and better URL structure for products. Layout is similair to our main site but all complex HTMLelements like multi select, large top navigations menu's etc are all removed. Many of these links are indexed by search engines and rank higher than links from our main website. The URL structure is www.domain.tld/1/optimized-url .Currently 64.000 of these URL’s are indexed. We have links to this sub site in the footer of every page but a normal customer would never reach this site unless they come from organic search. Once a user lands on one of these pages we try to push him back to the main site as quickly as possible. My planned approach to improve this: 1.) Tidy up the URL structure in the main website (e.g. www.domain.tld/women/dresses and www.domain.tld/diesel-red-skirt-4563749. I plan to use Solution 2 as described in http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck to block multi select URL’s from being indexed and would like to use the URL param “location” as an indicator for search engines to ignore the link. A risk here is that all my currently indexed URL (1.2 million URL’s) will be blocked immediately after I put this live. I cannot redirect those URL’s to the optimized URL’s as the old URL’s should still be accessible. 2.) Remove the links to the sub site (www.domain.tld/1/optimized-url) from the footer and redirect (301) all those URL’s to the newly created SEO friendly product URL’s. URL’s that cannot be matched since there is no similar catalog location in the main website will be redirected (301) to our homepage. I wonder if this is a correct approach and if it would be better to do this in a phased way rather than the currently planned big bang? Any feedback would be highly appreciated, also let me know if things are not clear. Thanks! Chris
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO0 -
Sitemap question
My sitemap includes www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html, they are both the same page, will this have any negative effects, or can I remove the www.example.com/index.html?
Technical SEO | | Aftermath_SEO0