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
-
Yes there is no problem with that, in fact redirect to a list of sitemaps, you can make the test
-
Thanks for your help Ramon!
-
Thanks Roman - that is helpful - with Yoast - do they redirect from one sitemap to another sitemap? Is that acceptable to Google (the redirect from one sitemap URL to another sitemap URL?).
-
Is not so weird, Yoast SEO generate multiples sitemaps based on pages, categories or even images and use the same structure, redirect from sitemap.xml to another url
Talking about the format
The Sitemap protocol enables you to provide details about your pages to search engines However, in addition to the XML protocol, there's anothers format supported such as RSS feeds and text files, which provide more limited information.So there are many option to create a sitemap but the most common and accepted is XML
Source > Sitemap.org
-
hi Luke Rowlands,
You can use another name (although i can´t come up with a reason why a client wouldn´t want that format in the url). You should however than
Link to it in your robots.txt or submit the sitemap directly 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
-
Removing dates from wordpress blog URL
Hi all, Ours is website's blog is built with wordpress. We used to have the below URL pattern like may other websites: www.website.com/blog/2016/04/10/topic-on-how-to-optimise-blog. Recently we removed the date and made the URL pattern to just like: www.website.com/blog/topic-on-how-to-optimise-blog All the links have been generated with new URLs across the blog. Still all the old URLs have been reported as crawl errors in search console. I am wondering will there be any auto redirect formula to redirect all the old URLs to new URLs. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Sitemap with homepage URL repeated several times - it is a problem?
Hello Mozzers, I am looking at a website with the homepage repeated several times (4 times) on the sitemap (sitemap is autogenerated via a plugin) - is this an SEO problem do you think - might it damage SEO performance, or can I ignore this issue? I am thinking I can ignore, yet it's an odd "issue" so your advice would be welcome! Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How to switch from URL based navigation to Ajax, 1000's of URLs gone
Hi everyone, We have thousands of urls generated by numerous products filters on our ecommerce site, eg./category1/category11/brand/color-red/size-xl+xxl/price-cheap/in-stock/. We are thinking of moving these filters to ajax in order to offer a better user experience and get rid of these useless urls. In your opinion, what is the best way to deal with this huge move ? leave the existing URLs respond as before : as they will disappear from our sitemap (they won't be linked anymore), I imagine robots will someday consider them as obsolete ? redirect permanent (301) to the closest existing url mark them as gone (4xx) I'd vote for option 2. Bots will suddenly see thousands of 301, but this is reflecting what is really happening, right ? Do you think this could result in some penalty ? Thank you very much for your help. Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JeremyICC0 -
XML Sitemaps - how to create the perfect XML Sitemap
Hello, We have a site that is not updated very often - currently we have a script running to create/update the XML sitemap every time a page is added/edited or deleted. I have a few questions about best practices for creating XML sitemaps. 1. If the site is not updated for months on end - is it a bad idea to force the script to update i.e. changing the dates once a month? Will google noticed nothing has changed just the date i.e. all the content on the site is exactly the same. Will they start penalising you for updating an XML sitemap when there is nothing new about the website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK
2. Is it worth automating the XML file to link into Bing/Google to update via webmaster tools - as I say even if the site is never updated?
3. Is the use of "priorities" necessary?
4. The changefreq - does that mean Google/Bing expects to see a new file ever month?
5. The ordering of the pages - the script seems pretty random and put the pages in a random order - should we make it order the pages with the most important ones first? Should the home page always be first?
6. Below is a sample of how our XML sitemap appears - is there anything that we should change? i.e. all marked up properly? This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"><url><loc>http://www.domain.com</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/contact/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/sitemap/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url></urlset> Hope someone can help enlighten us to best practices0 -
Sitemap.xml
Hi guys I read the seomoz article about sitemap.xml dated 2008. Just wanted to check views on: Is it worthwhile using the 'priority' What if everything is set to 100% Any tips to using the priority Many thanks in advance! Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5550 -
URL strategy mobile website
Hello everyone, We are facing a challenging decision about where our website (Flash Gaming website) is going. We are in the process of creating html5 games in the same theme of the flash games that we provide to our users. Now our main concern is to decide how to show this new content to the user? Shall we create brand new set of urls such as : http://www.mydomain.com/games/mobile/kids/ Or shall we adapt the main desktop url : http://www.mydomain.com/games/kids/ and show the users two different versions of the page depending on whether they are using a mobile device (so they see a mobile version) or a pc/laptop (so they a see desktop version). Or even redirect people to a sub-domain : http://m.mydomain.com/ The main idea we had is to keep the same url structure, as it seems that google is giving the same search results if you are using a mobile device or not. And creating a new set of urls or even a sub-domain, may involve a lot of work to get those new links to the same PA as the desktop URL that is here and know since a while now. Also the desktop page game should not be accessible to the mobile devices, so should this be redirected (301?) to the mobile homepage of the site? But how google will look at the fact that one url is giving 2 different contents, CSS etc, and also all those redirects might look strange... we are worried that doing so will hurt the page authority and its ranking ... but we are trying to find the best way to combine SEO and user experience. Any input on this will be really appreciated. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drimlike0 -
How often to resubmit updated sitemap?
Hello Forum, I am working with an eCommerce website (not huge, a site with ~300 products and a blog that is updated every few days) that occasionally adds new products and may make a few large edits per week, if that. Our CMS can automatically generate and submit our sitemap. Over what time interval is should we do this for? Daily, weekly, monthly, etc? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0 -
Changing URLS - wondering about implications
We are in the process of changing our URLs from dynamic to more SEO friendly. The website is ciee.org and I'm specifically talking about ciee.org/study. While we work with the business to get approval for ciee.org/study-abroad, we are going with ciee.org/study/abroad. Can anyone foresee any difficulties or negative implications that could come if we change from study/abroad to study-abroad all within 6 months? Thank you in advance!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CIEEwebTeam0