Sitemap Rules

[SEONOW123]

Hello there,

I have some questions pertaining to sitemaps that I would appreciate some guidance on.

1. Can an XML sitemap contain URLs that are blocked by robots.txt? Logically, it makes sense to me to not include pages blocked by robots.txt but would like some clarity on the matter i.e. will having pages blocked by robots.txt in a sitemap, negatively impact the benefit of a sitemap?

2. Can a XML sitemap include URLs from multiple subdomains? For example:

http://www.example.com/www-sitemap.xml would include the home page URL of two other subdomains i.e. http://blog.example.com/ & http://blog2.example.com/

Thanks

[MoosaHemani]

Theoretically, if the URL is blocked  by  robots.txt it should not appear in the index results no matter if they are in the sitemap but I have seen URLs indexed that are blocked by robots.txt but are in the sitemap and have good links pointing to it. If you want to block pages that have good links pointing to them, my advice is to remove them from sitemap. #justathought.

About URLs from multiple domains, I personally create separate sitemaps for different subdomains and link to main sitemap and I see better indexing that way.

Again, these are my personal experiences and not rules so please do keep that in mind as things can be different fro them.

[seanginnaw]

Hey,

1.) Yes you can do this and it won't 'negativel impact it' but it might cause a couple of Search Console errors when you come to submit the URLs - blocking crawlers in the robots.txt file is a directive that instructs them not to crawl that particular page. With this being said, supplying them with a sitemap of all page locations will not mean that they crawl these pages, but it is an instruction to crawlers that these pages do exist. Personally, I would meta noindex these pages to make sure that they don't reach search engines as the blocking in the robots.txt file can often not be enough to prevent this, especially if you're also submitting a sitemap.

2.) In short, I don't think you can have a single XML sitemap containing URLs from multiple subdomains BUT you can have sitemaps for multiple subdomains hosted on the TLD individually. Google have broken this down really well in their Webmaster Tools post:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en&topic=8476&ctx=topic

Hope this helps!

Sean