How can I get an XML sitemap in the order that I want?
-
I use Screaming Frog and Xenu on a daily basis and I use them for sitemap creation, but the functionality is limited. With huge sites, it's really easy to create an ordered list of URLs for the sitemap in excel or word and upload that to Screaming Frog to crawl. The only problem is that it won't export the sitemap in the order that I uploaded it. Does anybody know of a tool that will do this or am I doomed to sit an manually arrange the URLs the way I want?
-
Pleasure, glad it helped!
-
Thanks Marcus! I've done some research on it and had some people say to keep the most important URLs at the top and least important at the bottom, but now I"m seeing alot more people say that order doesn't matter. Which is great, cuz as you said, that would not be a fun Friday afternoon.
-
Hey Michael
I guess the obvious question here is why do you care about the order? I have never seen anything over on http://www.sitemaps.org that indicated that the order was of any importance and in fact, if you check the FAQ they have this statement.
Q: <a id="faq_url_position" name="faq_url_position"></a>Does position of a URL in a Sitemap influence its use?
No. The position of a URL in the Sitemap is not likely to impact how it is used or regarded by search engines.
So, I would not stress, make sure everything else is right and forget about the order as that seems like a really horrid cut and paste job for a Friday afternoon.
Hope this helps
Marcus
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
-
How I can get higher DA for sub-domian?
I have created a sub-domin https://travellife.egsky.net, Should it be treated as an independent site with regard to the site map and the internal links between it and the main domin egsky.net .which is better to obtain a higher Domain Authority? For example, when I adding a photo image for the sub-domin, Is it added on site map of the sub-domin or added for the 2 sites? Luxor-and-Aswan-Nile-Cruises-e1609000647702.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | egskylife0 -
What should my main sitemap URL be?
Hi Mozzers - regarding the URL of a website's main website: http://example.com/sitemap.xml is the normal way of doing it but would it matter if I varied this to: http://example.com/mainsitemapxml.xml or similar? I can't imagine it would matter but I have never moved away from the former before - and one of my clients doesn't want to format the URL in that way. What the client is doing is actually quite interesting - they have the main sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml - that redirects to the sitemap file which is http://example.com/sitemap (with no xml extension) - might that redirect and missing xml extension the redirected to sitemap cause an issue? Never come across such a setup before. Thanks in advance for your feedback - Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Should I bother with a Video Sitemap?
Morning all, I've started a pretty aggressive Video content push in recent weeks. All our videos are on our YouTube channel. I decided to go with hosting the videos on YouTube based on my research on moz.com, especially considering the potential reach of the content on YouTube. What I'm finding is that the YouTube channel is doing great. We've hit 200 subscribers and 15K views in a little under a month. Wayyyy more than I could have ever hoped for. But the blog posts on our website are getting minimal traffic and no search visibility. That doesn't necessarily bother me, since the intention of our marketing campaign is to use YouTube to drive traffic to our website. So I guess my question is really more to do with optimizing the site with Video Sitemaps and best practices for Google Webmaster Tools. Right now we have YouTube videos embedded on blog posts like this one that have a time-stamp. But I've been working to create Gallery-style pages (no time-stamp) which would have multiple YouTube videos embedded on them like this one. These make it easier for visitors to watch multiple videos without needing to skip around to multiple blog posts. The challenge I'm running into is that when I go to submit a Video Sitemap to GWT I get an error saying that I have duplicate page content within the video sitemap. I've used several WP plugins to do this. It seems that when there is a video embedded on multiple URLs (pages + posts) the plugins will ignore the posts and only add the pages to the video sitemap. Here is my regular Sitemap Here is my video Sitemap I've attached a screenshot of my current Yoast Video SEO config if that's useful for reference. Does anyone have experience with using multiple sitemaps in GWT? I'm starting to think that maybe I shouldn't even bother with a video sitemap. Maybe those gallery-style pages should just go in the regular sitemap? Any thoughts or advice would be highly appreciated! Thanks llQfydA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TMHoward860 -
Why do some sites have several types of sitemap?
Hello Mozzers, I often seem to work on websites with several types of sitemaps - e.g. an html sitemap - an xml sitemap - almost always with identical structure and content. Does anybody know the thinking behind this? Currently looking at site with php and xml sitemap sitting alongside one another. I'm guessing one is for site users to read (and also to aid indexing) and the other for search engines, to further aid indexing. Does Google have any preferences? Is there anything you should be wary of re: Google, if there are multiple sitemaps?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
How can using guest bloggers HURT me?
Hi Mozzers, I want to start accepting guest bloggers on my site to create content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
What potential pitfalls should I watch out for? Should they only link a certain amount of times to their site? Per article? Per everything?
Ratio of followed vs nofollowed links?
Should I not link to "hazardous" sites I don't want to associate myself with? How can I identify a site that will hurt my link profile?
What's the best way to make sure the guest bloggers aren't plagiarizing? Thanks!0 -
Can I compete with these results? (Brand in Serp)
Hey, One quick question. Lets say im fighting for keyword "british airways" and i want to appear straight after first result in number 2 position. Is it possible to compete with stroked results. (See image attached) Thanks Stxct.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marteen0 -
Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc1