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.
Xml sitemap advice for website with over 100,000 articles
-
Hi,
I have read numerous articles that support submitting multiple XML sitemaps for websites that have thousands of articles... in our case we have over 100,000. So, I was thinking I should submit one sitemap for each news category.
My question is how many page levels should each sitemap instruct the spiders to go? Would it not be enough to just submit the top level URL for each category and then let the spiders follow the rest of the links organically?
So, if I have 12 categories the total number of URL´s will be 12???
If this is true, how do you suggest handling or home page, where the latest articles are displayed regardless of their category... so I.E. the spiders will find l links to a given article both on the home page and in the category it belongs to. We are using canonical tags.
Thanks,
Jarrett
-
It's really a process of experimenting over time to find out the method that results in the most URLs indexed that in turn brings the most relevant traffic. Personally I wouldn't have one for each category, yet without tests there's no conclusive reasoning either way.
-
Thanks for the tip... I will do that.
I´m still unsure if I really need to submit a sitemap with thousands of URL´s I was thinking I should create an sitemap index file the points to individual top level category sitemaps and leave it at that. If I do this though, I suppose I don´t need individual sitemaps per category as I will just insert the category URL´s in the root sitemap. What do you think?
-
To add to Corey's response, I'll repeat what I just provided another question here on Pro Q&A. Sitemap.xml files can handle a maximum of 50,000 URLs, however I've seen them choke with as few as 10,000. Its important to run them through a tool like tools.pingdom.com to ensure they load within just a couple seconds.
Then submit them through Google/Bing webmaster systems and then see if they succeed in crawling all of them.
-
We break up our sitemap files into several different site maps, and then use a sitemap index file to make sure Google finds them all.
At the bottom of this post they talk about using an index file to combine multiple sitemaps, and they also specifically say it is fine to have one time sensitive site map (ie: front page items) and several other less time sensitive ones (categories in your case).
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/10/multiple-sitemaps-in-same-directory.html
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
-
Pending Sitemaps
Hi, all Wondering if someone could give me a pointer or two, please. I cannot seem to get Google or Bing to crawl my sitemap. If I submit the sitemap in WMT and test it I get a report saying 44,322urls found. However, if I then submit that same sitemap it either says Pending (in old WMT) or Couldn't fetch in the new version. This couldn't fetch is very puzzling as it had no issue fetching the map to test it. My other domains on the same server are fine, the problem is limited to this one site. I have tried several pages on the site using the Fetch as Google tool and they load without issue, however, try as I may, it will not fetch my sitemap. The sitemapindex.xml file won't even submit. I can confirm my sitemaps, although large, work fine, please see the following as an example (minus the spaces, of course, didn't want to submit and make it look like I was just trying to get a link) https:// digitalcatwalk .co.uk/sitemap.xml https:// digitalcatwalk .co.uk/sitemapindex.xml I would welcome any feedback anyone could offer on this, please. It's driving me mad trying to work out what is up. Many thanks, Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wonkydogadmin0 -
Please help need some advice?
Can any of you guys please help me I have alerts on links coming in and it looks like recently someone did this, it looks maliciously done as it is only our domain mentioned and most are brand new posts? http://testosteroneclinicindenve53950.shotblogs.com/testosterone-clinic-in-denver-fundamentals-explained-6102386 http://claytondmnnp.ampedpages.com/Details-Fiction-and-testosterone-clinic-in-denver-16897309 http://vinylvehiclecarwrap38041.alltdesign.com/a-review-of-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap-9574042 http://devinxccct.educationalimpactblog.com/1784474/little-known-facts-about-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap http://keeganbsftf.ka-blogs.com/7488539/how-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap-can-save-you-time-stress-and-money http://andybxoes.thezenweb.com/vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap-Fundamentals-Explained-17581028 http://kylerhfdzu.blogkoo.com/not-known-details-about-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap-9029141 http://troyytkyn.timeblog.net/7695911/the-greatest-guide-to-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap http://waylontyzab.pointblog.net/testosterone-clinic-in-denver-Secrets-16335972 http://testosteroneclinicindenve30516.onesmablog.com/Top-testosterone-clinic-in-denver-Secrets-17252737 http://emiliogkmop.blogofoto.com/7667522/top-guidelines-of-testosterone-clinic-in-denver http://caidenaczxt.blogs-service.com/7514172/testosterone-clinic-in-denver-fundamentals-explained http://daltonpyfms.mybjjblog.com/5-simple-statements-about-testosterone-clinic-in-denver-explained-6517932 Should I try to disavow these and submit to google or will google know our site which has been up for 5 years is not doing this? Should I do any of these https://tehnoblog.org/google-webmaster-tools-my-website-got-bombed-with-backlinks-what-to-do/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Href lang in image or video XML sitemaps
Does anyone know if it is possible/recommended/not recommended to use href lang in image or video XML sitemaps? This had not crossed my mind until recently, but a client asked me this question and I couldn't find any information on this topic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisKing0 -
Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?
We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?1 -
Website completely delisted - reasons?
Hi, I got a request from a potential client as he do not understand why his website cannot be found on Google. I've checked that and found out that the complete website is not listed (complete delist) at all - expect just one pdf file.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheHecksler
I've checked his robots.txt - but this is ok. I've checked the META Robots - but they are on index,follow ... ok so far. I've checked his backlinks but could not found any massive linking from bad pages - just 6 backlinks and only four of them from designdomains.com which looks like a linklist or so. I've requested access to their GWT account if available in hope to find more infos, but does anyone of you may have a quick idea what els it could be? What could be the issue? I think that they got delisted due to any bad reason ... Let me know your Ideas 🙂 THANX 🙂 Sebi0 -
Effects of having both http and https on my website
You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec1 -
Article Marketing / Article Posting
I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website. I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites. today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things: my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use) (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.) I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag. I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc. There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences. If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂 Thanks SEOMoz!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOWizards0 -
DNS or 301 Website Redirect
We are running a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label. Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front (which is a sub domain of the marketplace) and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them to point their url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice. We also want to understand what will show up in the address bar. Will it be their url or our sub domain? Will any of the marketplace seo juice boost their url local listing status?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bloomnation0