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.
Resubmit sitemaps on every change?
-
Hello Mozers,
Our sitemaps were submitted to Google and Bing, and are successfully indexed. Every time pages are added to our store (ecommerce), we re-generate the xml sitemap.
My question is: should we be resubmitting the sitemaps every time their content change, or since they were submitted once can we assume that the crawlers will re-download the sitemaps by themselves (I don't like to assume).
What are best practices here?
Thanks!
-
Great follow up! Thanks for that. :^)
-
For anybody that is interested in knowing, after 10 days of webmaster monitoring, here are our conclusions:
We have 2 sitemaps (2 languages). It took a few days for Google to re-download the mains sitemap, and a few more days to download the secondary sitemap, however, the new sitemaps were both picked up by Google with no intervention on our part.
Bing, however, has still no downloaded either of the updated sitemaps.
Because it's so easy and isn't seen as bad practice, we will be manually re-submitting sitemap updated to both search engines.
Thanks!
-
Ryan gave an excellent answer. Google is using other clues to pick up on new pages I'm not saying don't submit your sitemap I'm just saying add structured data/schema into your store as well. Check your crawl budget and see if your site is eating up too much of it and not being indexed properly by Google.
A simple test to see if something is being blocked is to run your site through https://varvy.com/
If you do not know, I would stress using Deep Crawl or screaming frog SEO spider
Navigation Is often one of many can cause problems where your site will not be crawled correctly.
To determine whether or not you have to crawl budget issue we got each can make independent image sitemaps and index sitemaps as well just to be sure that Google is getting what you want to.
Like Ryan said check out
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669
Here is a Magento dynamic site map http://i.imgur.com/QKS0bgU.png
validate your sitemap check it for problems
http://tools.seochat.com/tools/site-validator/
https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/learn/seo/schema-structured-data
http://www.searchmetrics.com/news-and-events/schema-org-in-google-search-results/
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-for-marketplaces-ecommerce/
JSON-LD Microdata
https://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/#json
I hope this helps,
Thomas
-
Hello. You can check the Submitted vs Indexed count within Search Console to see whether or not your regenerated sitemap is being picked up already, but resubmitting a sitemap isn't an issue, and fairly easy to do, per Google:
Resubmit your sitemap
- Open the Sitemaps report
- Select the sitemap(s) you want to resubmit from the table
- Click the Resubmit sitemap button.
You can also resubmit a sitemap by sending an HTTP GET request to the following URL, specifying your own sitemap URL: http://google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/my_sitemap.xml
Via: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669 Also from a FAQ in the Webmasters blog they state that, "Google does not penalize you for submitting a Sitemap."
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
-
Why have my positions dropped after implementing recommended changes?
Hello! I have taken a Moz free trial and am really enjoying using this service. But, after implementing the recommended changes by Moz my rankings have really dropped. Is this normal? I was averaging around 17 but now averaging 40. Here is my website if anyone has any ideas of what I might be doing wrong, I would greatly appreciate any help.
Technical SEO | | NicoleChambers
Thank you
Nicole1 -
How does changing sitemaps affect SEO
Hi all, I have a question regarding changing the size of my sitemaps. Currently I generate sitemaps in batches of 50k. A situation has come up where I need to change that size to 15k in order to be crawled by one of our licensed services. I haven't been able to find any documentation on whether or not changing the size of my sitemaps(but not the pages included in them) will affect my rankings negatively or my SEO efforts in general. If anyone has any insights or has experienced this with their site please let me know!
Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid0 -
Image Sitemap
I currently use a program to create our sitemap (xml). It doesn't offer creating an mage sitemaps. Can someone suggest a program that would create an image sitemap? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Indexing product attributes in sitemap
Hey Mozzers! I'm battling a few questions about the sitemap for my ecommerce store. Could you help me out? Is it necessary to include your product attributes in the sitemap? I'm not sure why it would matter to have a sitemap that lists everything in the color cherry. Also, if the attributes were included in the sitemap, would that count as duplicate content for the same products to show up in multiple attributes? Is there any benefit to submitting the sitemaps individually? For example, submitting /product-sitemap.xml, /product_brand-sitemap.xml versus just /sitemap.xml? Any other best practices for managing my ecommerce sitemap, or great resources, would be very helpful. Thank you! a1vUz
Technical SEO | | localwork0 -
Is sitemap required on my robots.txt?
Hi, I know that linking your sitemap from your robots.txt file is a good practice. Ok, but... may I just send my sitemap to search console and forget about adding ti to my robots.txt? That's my situation: 1 multilang platform which means... ... 2 set of pages. One for each lang, of course But my CMS (magento) only allows me to have 1 robots.txt file So, again: may I have a robots.txt file woth no sitemap AND not suffering any potential SEO loss? Thanks in advance, Juan Vicente Mañanas Abad
Technical SEO | | Webicultors0 -
Should all pagination pages be included in sitemaps
How important is it for a sitemap to include all individual urls for the paginated content. Assuming the rel next and prev tags are set up would it be ok to just have the page 1 in the sitemap ?
Technical SEO | | Saijo.George0 -
Removing Redirected URLs from XML Sitemap
If I'm updating a URL and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL, Google recommends I remove the old URL from our XML sitemap and add the new URL. That makes sense. However, can anyone speak to how Google transfers the ranking value (link value) from the old URL to the new URL? My suspicion is this happens outside the sitemap. If Google already has the old URL indexed, the next time it crawls that URL, Googlebot discovers the 301 redirect and that starts the process of URL value transfer. I guess my question revolves around whether removing the old URL (or the timing of the removal) from the sitemap can impact Googlebot's transfer of the old URL value to the new URL.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
How to handle sitemap with pages using query strings?
Hi, I'm working to optimize a site that currently has about 5K pages listed in the sitemap. There are not in face this many pages. Part of the problem is that one of the pages is a tool where each sort and filter button produces a query string URL. It seems to me inefficient to have so many items listed that are all really the same page. Not to mention wanting to avoid any duplicate content or low quality issues. How have you found it best to handle this? Should I just noindex each of the links? Canonical links? Should I manually remove the pages from the sitemap? Should I continue as is? Thanks a ton for any input you have!
Technical SEO | | 5225Marketing0