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.
How important are sitemap errors?
-
If there aren't any crawling / indexing issues with your site, how important do thing sitemap errors are? Do you work to always fix all errors?
I know here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds
Duane Forrester mentions that sites with many 302's 301's will be punished--does any one know Googe's take on this?
-
Very important. Particularly if you have a large site. We operate a large site with 100,000's of pages and as Dan said it can be difficult to maintain. We use something called Unlimited XML Sitemap Generator which builds XML sitemaps for us automatically. I'd highly recommend it although it takes a bit of fiddling with to get it up and running as it's software which sits on site. We couldn't manage without it as we'd be forever on sitemaps.
We found that getting sitemaps right on a large site made a huge difference to the crawl rate that we encountered in GWT and a huge indexation to follow.
In particular check for 302's. I made the mistake of leaving those for a while and am sure that we suffered from some loss of link equity along the way.
Hope it helps
Dawn
-
Your sitemap should only list pages that actually exist.
If you delete some pages, then you need to rebuild the sitemap.
Ditto if you delete them and redirect.
Google is always lagging, so if you delete 10 pages and then update the sitemap, even if google downloads the sitemap immediately, they will still be running crawls on the old map, and they may be crawling the now-missing pages, but haven't shown the failures in your WMT yet.
If you update your sitemap quickly, it is possible they will never crawl the missing pages and get a 404 or 301.
(but of course, there could be other sites pointing to the now-missing pages, and the 404s will show up elsewhere as missing)
I am always checking, adding, deleting and redirecting pages, and I update the current sitemap every hour and all the others are rebuilt at midnight every night. I usually do deletions just before midnight if I can, to minimize the time the sitemap is out of sync.
-
As far as I know Google is more lenient with sitemap errors, but I would still recommend looking into it. The first step would be to be sure your sitemap is up to date to begin with - and has all the URLs you want (and not any you don't want). The main thing is none of them should 404 and then beyond that, yes, they should return 200's.
Unless you're dealing with a gigantic site which might be hard to maintain, in theory there shouldn't be errors in sitemaps if you have the correct URLs in there.
Even better, if you're running WordPress the Yoast SEO plugin will generate an XML sitemap for you and it update automatically.
Hope that helps!
-Dan
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
-
Does anyone know how to fix this structured data error on search console? Invalid value in field "itemtype"
I'm getting the same structured data error on search console form most of my websites, Invalid value in field "itemtype" I take off all the structured data but still having this problem, according to Search console is a syntax problem but I can't find what is causing this. Any guess, suggestion or solution for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexanders0 -
Thousands of 503 errors in GSC for pages not important to organic search - Is this a problem?
Hi, folks A client of mine now has roughly 30 000 503-errors (found in the crawl error section of GSC). This is mostly pages with limited offers and deals. The 503 error seems to occur when the offers expire, and when the page is of no use anymore. These pages are not important for organic search, but gets traffic from direct and newsletters, mostly. My question:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
Does having a high number of 503 pages reported in GSC constitute a problem in terms of organic ranking for the domain and the category and product pages (the pages that I want to rank for organically)? If it does, what is the best course of action to mitigate the problem? Looking excitingly forward to your answers to this 🙂 Sigurd0 -
Not found errors (404) due to being hacked
Hi Moz Guru's Our website was hacked a few months ago, since then we have taken various measures, last one being redesigning the website all together and removing it from a WordPress platform. So far all is going well, except that the 404 not found errors keeps coming up in Google Webmaster tools. The URLs are spam pages that were created by the virus. And these spam pages have been indexed by Google, and now we are struggling to get rid of them. Is there any way we can deal with these 404 spam pages links? Is marking all of them as fixed in the webmaster tools - search console- crawl errors helpful in any way? Can this have a negative impact on the SEO ? Looking forward to your answers. Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monicapopa0 -
Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?
Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch
Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
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 -
How important is the number of indexed pages?
I'm considering making a change to using AJAX filtered navigation on my e-commerce site. If I do this, the user experience will be significantly improved but the number of pages that Google finds on my site will go down significantly (in the 10,000's). It feels to me like our filtered navigation has grown out of control and we spend too much time worrying about the url structure of it - in some ways it's paralyzing us. I'd like to be able to focus on pages that matter (explicit Category and Sub-Category) pages and then just let ajax take care of filtering products below these levels. For customer usability this is smart. From the perspective of manageable code and long term design this also seems very smart -we can't continue to worry so much about filtered navigation. My concern is that losing so many indexed pages will have a large negative effect (however, we will reduce duplicate content and be able provide much better category and sub-category pages). We probably should have thought about this a year ago before Google indexed everything :-). Does anybody have any experience with this or insight on what to do? Thanks, -Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cre80 -
Sitemap in SERPS
What's up guys, Having some troubles with SERP rankings. My sitemap (navigation) is appearing instead of my actual keywords. I have tried a few methods to fix this; setting a preferred domain, using a 301 redirects, deleting out of date pages via Google webmaster tools. Nothing seems to work. My next step was to refresh the cache for my entire site - does anyone know how to do this? Can't see any tools... Any help would be great. Cheers, Jon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjk240