What is the best practice for replacing an old xml sitemap?
-
I have an existing xml sitemap that my website developer loaded, however I don't think its set up properly.
What is the best practice for replacing an old xml sitemap?
Is there anything I should be concerned about?
-
Depending on the size of your site, I would probably break your sitemap up into categories for better monitoring.
- Sitemap.xml (sitemap index of all your sitemaps)
- sitemap-blog.xml
- sitemap-categories.xml
- sitemap-main.xml
- sitemap-videos.xml (if you have any videos you should create a video sitemap, different then a standard sitemap)
When you have them all complete and tested, then submit them to both Google and Bing via Webmaster Tools.
Sitemap Protocol Information: http://www.sitemaps.org
Google's XML Sitemap information: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184
-
You could use a XML sitemap builder like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com, I just tested it and seems to work alright.
Make sure you are truthful about how often you update your website with content. This could be daily, weekly monthly and so on. Second, I would let the sitemap builder determine importance of your pages, it should make your home page the most important.
WARNING: Using the above service will let you work with only 500 pages, if you have more than 500 pages on your website do not use the sitemap it generates.
You can find other services by searching "sitemap generator"
The best way would be to use http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/ but configuration and setup is required.
Good Luck! Hope this helps.
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
-
Recommend me best tools for live ranking
Hello, guys, I have a question, that which tools are best for ranking because MOZ update ranking after a week and I want a live ranking of my website leatherbaba.com Kindly recommend me best tools for SEO.Many Thanks!
Moz Pro | | fahaffff0 -
What is the best way to add a noindex./nofollow meta tags to tags in a blog?
Could anyone tell me the best way to add noindex./nofollow meta tags as I have around 12 duplicate tags in a blog. I have the Yoast SEO plugin - unpaid version.
Moz Pro | | SEM_at_Lees0 -
Another site copied my content word for word. Whats the best way to handle or report this?
I work at CloudHashing and created a Bitcoin 101 and glossary for the site. - https://cloudhashing.com/bitcoin-101 The content was written by my team members and I, so it's all unique content. This site recently popped up and scraped all of our content - http://www.pacifichashing.com/bitcoin-class-101/ (It looks like they are located in Hong Kong- I'm not positive though) How will this affect us and will it benefit their site to copy our content? What's the best way to handle situations like this? Should I report this? If so, how? It sucks to see something my team and I worked really hard on to have it scraped by a competitor. Thanks in advance for any help! -Ryan
Moz Pro | | cloudhasher0 -
Is it still best practice to optimize your site with geographic long tail keywords?
Since Google is tailoring search results to user IP and location, is it still best practice to optimize your site titles etc. with long-tail geographic keywords? For example, instead of optimizing a page for "dentist in West Palm Beach, Florida", search users who are IN West Palm Beach can just search "dentists" and a list of local dentists will be displayed (both in the local listings AND organic search listings). I'd love to see Rand cover this on a Whiteboard Friday!
Moz Pro | | RickyShockley1 -
Visual Sitemap (Flowchart) Generator - including link flow
Hi All, Having read a useful article http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/ I'm now looking to acquire a means of being able to simply type in a URL and see the site structure including link flow. A free website or software app would be great... Thanks in advance Mark
Moz Pro | | Mark_Ch0 -
What is the best Dev company to use to make a white label SEO Dashboard
If anyone knows of a design someone has built, or if you know of one that we can purchase and customize ourselves that would be an option too. I am looking to have a company build us a white label SEO dashboard that integrates SEOMOZ api and SEMRUSH api. I also like majesticSEO api for the lost links only, the rest of majesticSEO I don't really care about I like SEOMOZ much better hence why I am here. I need the following 1. Someone to be able to login and add their logo if they are a reseller company of our services, so we can offer white label solutions to them. 2. I need to have an admin section where we can upload backlinks. The admin section should do the minimum 2.1 Allow us to select a website, select a link type, and upload the backlinks. It should extract specific columns from a CSV and upload them into the desired website/link area like a guest post or a social bookmark etc.. 3. We need graphs and all of the fancy looks for others to look at.. 4. We want to make sure that someone can download the report to their desktop in a doc, excel, or pdf form. Extras Automatic rank checking like IBP or Jonathen Ledgers new software etc.. If not I will just continue to use IBP it's not a big deal.
Moz Pro | | MarketingOfAmerica0 -
Status Errors generated from xml site map
I just ran a crawl test on our site and I'm seeing a lot of 404 errors that are referredt from the xml sitemap.. Anyone know how to fix it?
Moz Pro | | IITWebTeam0 -
Why is the SEOmoz crawler crawling the old version of our website?
Hello, I'm a new SEOmoz member. On Dec. 2nd, after completely redesigning our website, we migrated to a new hosting company by switching our DNS to the new server. The vast majority of the URLs have changed and we configured redirects of the old URLs to the new ones. Although, this task is not completed yet. After the migration, I created an account on SEOmoz to be able to track our progress and find the issues to fix to optimize our SEO. For some reason, in the SEOmoz reports it is the old URLs that show up. Unless the crawler does not actually crawl the pages and only uses the indexed pages to generate its report, I don't understand how could this possible. Anyone has a clue? When will the new URLs be indexed by SEOmoz and the major search engines? Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | Gestisoft-Qc0