Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Where to link to HTML Sitemap?
-
After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions.
Should you have an HTML sitemap?
If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from?
Should you use a noindex, follow tag?
Thank you
-
I always create one and link from the footer text navigation. It is beneficial for usability and search engine spidering. Also. I never add special qualifiers to links like follow etc etc unless it is in the negative (don't follow etc) and even then you can omit pages via robots.txt
-
They are also on all the service pages at the top.
-
If the site is built well, then all pages would be accessible via 3 clicks. So html sitemaps really aren't needed.
-
If something is popular, would it be at the bottom?
-
You're right. I have never clicked on a footer sitemap link either. I have a popular pages section right about the footer. Maybe that be fine work.
-
I do have XML sitemaps setup correctly. I decided to just add it on the homepage for human visitors and on the 404 pages. The noindex idea was so Google didn't index the sitemap but that's when I had it on every page. I guess it doesn't matter if it's just on the homepage.
-
I do have XML sitemaps setup correctly. I decided to just add it on the homepage for human visitors and on the 404 pages. The noindex idea was so Google didn't index the sitemap but that's when I had it on every page. I guess it doesn't matter if it's just on the homepage.
-
Hi Will,
Personally, I approach this from two perspectives: Usability and SEO.
Usability: I don't think I've ever clicked on a footer sitemap myself when looking for things on a website. If organic search does not take me to what I want, I do a bit more browsing with a last ditch effort using the keyword search box. If that doesn't work, I bounce back to my organic search results and try another site or refine my search.
Therefore, I removed the footer sitemap from our ecommerce site and created a left nav link to additional categories. The link is above the fold and I call it "Additional Categories." I am shocked at the volume of visitors who go to that page - far more than every visited our footer sitemap.
SEO: In my opinion, a sitemap moves links up to the second tier click level because they are buried too deep and don't get the juice. These pages need to be moved up perhaps because the link structure and hierarchy are not sound or maybe it is just too big of a challenge to flatten out all portions of a site.
Therefore, I flatten out and improve the link structure (or as sound as you can get). If there are categories that warrant indexing, but are not best sellers, I put them on the additional categories page. If some of the categories are 3 clicks (sometimes 4) and difficult to flatten out or fix, I put them in the additional categories page so people can see them and spiders can crawl them. Our site currently does not have the authority to force the juice to deeper penetration.
-
I feel html site maps are no longer needed if you correctly setup XML sitemaps, and also link to them from your robots.txt file.
But if you still want them for users, then I would put it in the footer, and have Google Index and Follow.
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
-
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
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 -
Should I redirect my xml sitemap?
Hi Mozzers, We have recently rebranded with a new company name, and of course this necessitated us to relaunch our entire website onto a new domain. I watched the Moz video on how they changed domain, copying what they did pretty much to the letter. (Thank you, Moz for sharing this with the community!) It has gone incredibly smoothly. I told all my bosses that we may see a 40% reduction in traffic / conversions in the short term. In the event (and its still very early days) we have in fact seen a 15% increase in traffic and our new website is converting better than before so an all-round success! I was just wondering if you thought I should redirect my XML sitemap as well? So far I haven't, but despite us doing the change of address thing in webmaster tools, I can see Google processed the old sitemap xml after we did the change of address etc. What do you think? I know we've been very lucky with the outcome of this rebrand but I don't want to rest on my laurels or get tripped up later down the line. Thanks everyone! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Does Link Detox Boost Work?
That is a question I am sure many of your have been asking since they launched the product several weeks ago. Cemper claims they helped get a penalty removed in 3 days by using this product. Sounds great doesn't it? Maybe even sounds too good to be true. Well, here is my experience with it. We have been working to get a site's rankings back up for several months now. While it has no penalty, it clearly got hit by the algo change. So we have been very busy creating new content and attempting to remove as much "keyword rich" links as possible. This really hasn't been working very well at all, so when I heard about link detox boost I thought this was the answer to our prayers. The basic idea is link detox boost forces google to crawl your bad links so it know you no longer have links from those sites or have disavowed them. So we ran it and it was NOT cheap. Roughly $300. Now, 3 weeks after running it, the report only shows it has actually crawled 25% of our links, but they assure us it is a reporting issue and the full process has ran its course. The results. No change at all. Some of our rankings are worse, some are better, but nothing worth mentioning. Many products from Link Research Tools are very good, but i'm afraid this isn't one of them. Anyone else use this product? What were your results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper2 -
Subdomain Blog Sitemap link - Add it to regular domain?
Example of setup:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE3
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com). I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap. 1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol? 2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer. 3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap. Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done. Thanks!0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10