XML Sitemap Questions For Big Site
-
Hey Guys,
I have a few question about XML Sitemaps.
-
For a social site that is going to have presonal accounts created, what is the best way to get them indexed? When it comes to profiles I found out that twitter (https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles) and facebook (https://www.facebook.com/find-friends?ref=pf) have directory pages, but Google plus has xml index pages (http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml).
-
If we go the XML route, how would we automatically add new profiles to the sitemap? Or is the only option to keep updating your xml profiles using a third party software (sitemapwriter)?
-
If a user chooses to not have their profile indexed (by default it will be index-able), how do we go about deindexing that profile? Is their an automatic way of doing this?
-
Lastly, has anyone dappled with google sitemap generator (https://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/) if so do you recommend it?
Thank you!
-
-
Thanks for the input guys!
I believe Twitter and Facebook don't run sitemaps for their profiles, what they have is a directory for all their profiles (twitter: https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/find-friends?ref=pf) and use that to get their profiles crawled, however I feel the best approach is through xml sitemaps and Google plus actually does this with their profiles (http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml) and quite frankly I would rather follow Google then FB or Twitter... I'm just now wondering how the hell they upkeep that monster! Does it create a new sitemap everything one hits 50k? When do they update their sitemap? daily, weekly, or monthly and how?
One other question I have is if their is any penalties to getting a lot of pages crawled at once? Meaning one day we have 10 pages and the next we have 10,000 pages or 50,000 pages...
Thanks again guys!
-
I guess the way I was explaining it was for scalabilty on a large site. You have to think a site like fb or twitter with hundreds of millions of users still has the limitation of only having 50k records in a site map. So if they are running site maps, they have hundreds.
-
I'm not a web developer, so this might may be wrong, but I feel like it might be easier to just add every user to the xml sitemap and then add a noindex robots meta tag ons users pages that don't want to their profiles to be indexed.
-
If it were me and someone were asking me to design a system like that, I would design it in a few parts.
First I would create an application that handled the sitemap minus profiles, just for your tos, sign up pages, terms, and what ever pages like that.
Then I would design a system that handled the actual profiles. It would be pretty complex and resource intensive as the site grew. But the main idea flows like this
Start generation, grab the user record with id 1 in the database, check to see if indexable (move to next if not), see what pages are connected, write to xml file, loop back and start with record #2.
There are a few concessions you have to make, you need to keep up with the number of records in a file before you start another file. You can only have 50k records in one file.
The way I would handle the process in total for a large site would be this, sync the required tables via a weekly or daily cron to another instance (server). Call the php script (because that is what I use) that creates the first sitemap for the normal site wide pages. At the end of that site map, put a location for the user profile sitemap, then at the end of the scrip, execute the user profile site map generating script. At the end of each site map, put the location of the next site map file, because as you grow it might take 2-10000 site map files.
One thing that I would ensure to do is get a list of crawler ip addresses and in your .htaccess have an allow / deny rule. That way you can make the site maps only visible to the search engines.
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
-
XML sitemap generator only crawling 20% of my site
Hi guys, I am trying to submit the most recent XML sitemap but the sitemap generator tools are only crawling about 20% of my site. The site carries around 150 pages and only 37 show up on tools like xml-sitemaps.com. My goal is to get all the important URLs we care about into the XML sitemap. How should I go about this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl0 -
Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
Hi There We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu? Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages? Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ruislip180 -
HTML or XML sitemap - benefits
Hi all, Can I use only HTML sitemap or I should use both versions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormar
How much I would lose in case when I would lose only HTML sitemap, without XML sitemap? Thank you.0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
To include in Sitemap or not to include?
Hello all, A bit of a confusing one but please bear with me... On our website we have a Used Cars section where each morning a feed is loaded onto our site with any changes to the stock. Some cars may have been sold and removed, some new cars may be added, some prices may be changed, every day every morning this very large section of our website is updated. The question I have is, should I be including these urls in my sitemap? The Used Cars section is a huge portion of our website content and is our most important area, the Used Cars overview is our most frequently visited page. The reason I ask is because of course Google might crawl and see car X, but tomorrow car X could be gone and be replaced with car Y. Should I be even mentioning these pages to Google if by tomorrow some of those urls could be gone? It's always changing and it's something we don't have control of. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Hreflang in vs. sitemap?
Hi all, I decided to identify alternate language pages of my site via sitemap to save our development team some time. I also like the idea of having leaner markup. However, my site has many alternate language and country page variations, so after creating a sitemap that includes mostly tier 1 and tier 2 level URLs, i now have a sitemap file that's 17mb. I did a couple google searches to see is sitemap file size can ever be an issue and found a discussion or two that suggested keeping the size small and a really old article that recommended keeping it < 10mb. Does the sitemap file size matter? GWT has verified the sitemap and appears to be indexing the URLs fine. Are there any particular benefits to specifying alternate versions of a URL in vs. sitemap? Thanks, -Eugene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_bgb0 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0