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.
Sitemaps. When compressed do you use the .gz file format or the (untidy looking, IMHO) .xml.gz format?
-
When submitting compressed sitemaps to Google I normally use the a file named sitemap.gz
A customer is banging on that his web guy says that sitemap.xml.gz is a better format.
Google spiders sitemap.gz just fine and in Webmaster Tools everything looks OK...
Interested to know other SEOmoz Pro's preferences here and also to check I haven't made an error that is going to bite me in the ass soon!
Over to you.
-
Thanks Big Bazza... I like the 'better' vs 'accepted' reasoning. Not too confrontational
-
Generally the .xml.gz format is the one stated in examples there are a few references to this here : http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index
Most sitemap generators that create both compressed and uncompressed sitemap files name them sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz respectively. It also makes it clearer what the content of the zipped file is. I don't believe it is essential however, as you will direct tools such as google.com/webmasters to your xml sitemap - rather than expect it to find it of its own accord.
I always use the .xml.gz format when compressing. I would argue that (if both formats work) neither one is 'BETTER' than the other, rather one is more ACCEPTED than the other.
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
-
Spotify XML Sitemap
All, Working on an SEO work up for a Spotify site. Looks like they are using a sitemap that links to additional pages. A problem, none of the links are actually linked within the sitemap. This feels like a strong error. https://lubricitylabs.com/sitemap.xml Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dmaher0 -
Sitemaps: Best Practice
What should and what shouldn't go in the sitemap? In particular, pages like subscribe to our newsletter/ unsubscribe to our newsletter? Is there really any benefit in highlighting those pages to the SEs? Thanks for any advice/ anecdotes 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Using pictures from another domain
We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer. Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server. There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues? will this generate Google penalties? Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it. We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters. How important is the file name for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
404 Errors with my RSS Feed/sitemap
In my google webmasters I just started getting 404 errors that I'm not sure how to redirect. I'm getting quite a few that are ending in /feed/ for instance /nyc-accident-injury/feed/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jsmythd
contact-us-thank-you/feed/ and then also a problem with my sitemap I guess? With /site-map/?postsort=tags The domain is pulversthompson.com0 -
302 redirects in the sitemap?
My website uses a prefix at the end to instruct the back-end about visitor details. The setup is similar to this site - http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf with a 302 redirect from the normal link to the one with additional info and a canonical tag on the actual URL without the extra info ((the normal one here being http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com,) However, when I used www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a sitemap they did so using the URLs with the extra info on the links... what should I do to create a sitemap using the normal URLs (which are the ones I want to be promoting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
How does badly formatted HTML affect SEO?
Our website uses a custom built CMS, but uses a fairly standard WYSIWYG text editor. I've looked at some of the code it produces, and it's not pretty. My gut feeling tells me that this extra bloat is bad for SEO. Am I right in thinking that Google doesn't look kindly upon badly formatted and bloated HTML? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
Online Sitemap Generator
I have a site that has around 5,000 pages now. Are there any recommened online free/paid tools to generate a sitemap for me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster0