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.
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
-
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools.
However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I was confusing those.
To execute the sitemap index, would I just point the crawlers to the index? Do you have any links to overviews of how to set that up?
-
There are also scripts you can purchase for very little cost and have them install it for you on your server and set up a cron job to have your sitemap run automatically each week and ping the search engines to find your sitemap.
One such service is at xml-sitemaps.com - they can install it for you and set up the cron job as well.
Just make sure you are on a good server that can handle the script if your website is large.
-
I think you may be getting xml sitemaps confused with sitemap pages. Your xml sitemap should live at /sitemap.xml as Alan pointed out. The seomoz and other sites that have a /sitemap page is for different purposes. Its not your xml file, its a "topical guide" to your website and all the major sections of your site.
Remember that you can also create a xml sitemap index if you need to have different sitemaps (video, news, content) that houses all the different xml sitemaps underneath it.
-
Typically I use /sitemap.xml
I dont think it matters what you call it, as long as its submitted to Google webmaster tools.
Check out sitemaps.org for more info on how to create a quality sitemap
-
Great, thanks!
Should we also have it live at /sitemap, as SEOmoz does?
-
Yes they will pick it up, you can put the address in your robots.txt file,
http://thatsit.com.au/robots.txt
then you dont need to submit it and all search engines will find it.
Keeep it up todate, free from 404's, 301's all urls should be status code 200, and keep it accurate. Bing for one will igniore it if it is not clean and acurate, they allow only a couple of percent error rate.
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 does a site that is worse than mine by every objective measure I can find, keep outranking me in search?
I’ve been working on educating myself about SEO all day, again. All-Star Telescope up in Canada. We have a competitor that consistently ranks #1 and I don't get it. Their site is full of duplicate content (straight copy and paste from the manufacturer site). They don't have any meaningful blog or video content to add relevance or value to their site. We have higher page authority, higher domain authority, and they keyword analyzer in moz says that our page is higher quality than the the competitors page. Our site is slow, but theirs is slower. I can’t find a single metric on any tool (ubbersuggest, Moz, ahrefs, semrush) that says Telescopes Canada is a better site, or has a better NexStar 8SE product page (a popular telescope). Here’s the link to Telescope Canada’s page for their Celestron 8SE: https://telescopescanada.ca/products/celestron-nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope-11069?_pos=1&_sid=f0aa91cc2&_ss=r Here’s a link to the Celestron 8SE page from the manufacturer website: https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope?_pos=1&_sid=56abdabd4&_ss=r#description Telescopes Canada has just copied and pasted. There is no original content aside from adding the shipping and return policy to the tab, and having some options for selecting accessories on the page. Here is our page: https://all-startelescope.com/products/celestron-nexstar-8se Our titles are good, our metadata is good (but I don’t think that’s been a serious ranking factor for about ten years). The text is original, it’s relevant, we have healthy internal links to the page. We have invensted in some excellent blog content, we’re adding new products to the website so that we rank for more keywords. All of those things are helping, but I fundamentally don’t understand why Telescopes Canada is #1 almost across the board on every key product in our market. There is something that I’m not seeing here, something that isn't being captured by the tools that I have. Is it simple the fact that they get more traffic? Is that why some people go and buy traffic? Can you see any metric, any tool in your toolbox that indicates why they rank at the top, or even higher than we do for in these search terms specific to that product: Celestron NexStar 8SE
Technical SEO | | nkennett
NexStar 8SE
Celestron NexStar 8SE Canada
NexStar 8SE Canada We've worked with two highly ranked SEO's to try and figure this out, one in Canada, and one in the USA. I haven't seen a confidence inspiring answer from either of them. Posting on a forum is a bit of an act of desperation, I'll continue to work the problem, but it's discouraging to see the leader in my industry look like he's just phoning it in with his website.1 -
Will Google crawl and rank our ReactJS website content?
We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
Technical SEO | | Jane.com
http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.0 -
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!
Technical SEO | | yacpro131 -
Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.
This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum. We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index." No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file. Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping. We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter. It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas? I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.
Technical SEO | | Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
Video Sitemaps <video:content_loc>and<video:player_loc></video:player_loc></video:content_loc>
Hi guys, If I'm creating a video sitemap do I need to use both: video:content_locandvideo:player_loc</video:player_loc></video:content_loc> Or could I just use video:content_loc?</video:content_loc> Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tug-Agency0 -
/index.php in sitemap? take it out?
Hi Everyone, The following was automatically generated at xml-sitemaps.com Should I get rid of the index.php url from my sitemap? If so, how do I go about redirecting it in my htaccess ? <url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/</loc></url>
Technical SEO | | RogersSEO
<url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/index.php</loc></url> thank you in advance, Martin0 -
Google.ca is showing our US site instead of our Canada Site
When our Canadian users who search on google.ca for our brand (e.g. Travelocity, Travelocity hotels, etc.), the first few results our from our US site (travelocity.com) rather than our Canadian site (travelocity.ca). In Google Webmaster Tools, we've adjusted the geotargeting settings to focus on the appropriate locale, but the wrong country TLD is still coming up at the top via google.ca. What's the best way to ensure our Canadian site comes up instead of the US site on google.ca? Thanks, Tory Smith
Technical SEO | | travelocitysearch
Travelocity0