XML Sitemap for classifieds

[MozAddict]

I have seeon some trends for sites which do not even use XML sitemp and robots e.g. see this site. How do you see if sitemap is not used.

Also for classified websites, should ad pages be included in sitemap because after certain duration those ads will be deleted and google might not be able to crawl. What do you suggest about XML sitemap for classified website.

[razasaeed]

I run a classified site and have different opinion:

• Submit your individual classified listing pages to site map. Title and descriptions of each classifieds are different and can help you bring long-tail traffic.
• Submit your individual classified listing images in site map, it will help you bring traffic through image search.
• Google and everyone else strong recommends to use rel=next and rel=prev rather then putting canonical to the first page. Also don't use both of them together because you will be confusing google. If you have to put canonical then do a canonical to the page minus anyother sort parameters so canonical on page 2 will be pointing to page minus all sort parameters, etc.

Hope it helps !

[mememax]

Sitemap and robots are not required but recommended. However you may find sites which doesn't need them jsut because they're really tiny or which doesn't want to show they blocked pages to competitors.

Sitemap may be the same, you don't want to show to your competitors your site structure or your site is so small that is useless. Also a sitemap may be useful for you to be sure that google is aware of all you urls and that those urls are crawled constantly.

For a classified ads site I'll recommend to use map for categories. You want google to rank those pages because there are the ones rankings for broader keywords and attracting users which may convert. Create one or more sitemap (with an index), based on how many urls you have, (limits for each sitemap are 50k urls per sitemap).

I'll also recommend  you to canonicalize you paginated series to the main page and submit only the first page. In that way google will focus on the first page and consolidating all the value there.