What is the difference between html sitemap and xml sitemap in SEO?
An XML sitemap is a tool used by search engines to crawl your site. It is in theory not always needed, but Google recommends that you always have one.
A HTML sitemap is map of your site displayed in a user friendly format, a page with links that the user can use to navigate your website. As long as you have a good XML sitemap it won't really affect your SEO.
Few sites have HTML sitemaps anymore since it's generally not the way people prefer to navigate a page, but of course this will vary from site to site. If you think the user is helped by a HTML sitemap then you should make one, but you don't need to create one for SEO reasons.
Simple, HTML sitemap is userfriendly so its useful for users, and XML Sitemap is for Webmasters.
HTML Sitemap contain all pages in sequence while XML Sitemap contain in Hierarchy manners.
HTML sitemap is more likely to assist users (people/website visitors) on the site's website directory. XML, on the other hand, assists bots or crawlers (like Google bots) to know more about the website's architecture or directory. If you are confused which one to use, I would rather select XML for the bots. HTML are not used by most users. They're more likely concerned with the navigation menu.
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I have a site in five languages with several 100.000s of pages. Every day about 10 to 50 new pages are added. 95% of these new pages contain news content (articles). How do I create a XML sitemap for a site like this? More specifically:
I was thinking to let a spider go over the sections that are frequently updated. For all these sections I could make a separate sitemap. It could happen that the same URL is included in different sitemaps though. Is that a problem?
Should I create a different sitemap for each language?
How frequently do I ping Google?
Thanks
I was thinking to let a spider go over the sections that are frequently updated. For all these sections I could make a separate sitemap. It could happen that the same URL is included in different sitemaps though. Is that a problem?
Ans. No, having same URL in multiple sitemap is not a problem.
Should I create a different sitemap for each language?
Ans. Yes, That will be better and easy to maintain
How frequently do I ping Google?
Ans. Submit your sitemaps in "Google Search Console", it will automatically crawled by Google.
Use SiteMap Index for your multiple sitemap links https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en
Limit your each XML sitemaps to 50,000 URLs
I was searching on the web after I analyzed the link structure of Yoast. There he uses links to redirect users to a different page.
Here a example:
https://yoast.com/out/synthesis/
Can someone tell me what this is called, or how I create such links as well?
It's actually really simple. He isn't using it for SEO purposes since it's just a 301 redirect. He is purposefully hiding the affiliate url AND adding 'onclick' Google Analytics tracking to the link. Also - the "/out/" directory is being blocked by robots.txt and then redirect's back to the index page.
To answer your question:
This is not for SEO reasons. He is using it for both tracking click and hiding his affiliate link/url.
These are called internal links, when you link to you one of your domain or subdomain pages. Internal links adds values for SEO as it makes the crawlers aware of those existing pages. There are many options for generating internal links. It depends on your page structure etc. Some of the common options are by using html sitemap like trip advisor's does, using header and footer. For html sitemaps, go to http://www.tripadvisor.com/, scroll all the way bottom to the footer section. There you can sitemap link, which is a path way for many internal links.
I have a site with an input text.
User types the name of a city, hits enter and it's linked there.
my sitemap.xml looks like this:
<urlset>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/rome.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/london.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/newyork.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/paris.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/berlin.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/toronto.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/milan.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/edinburgh.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/nice.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/boston.html</loc></url>
...
</urlset>
My question is:
Will I be penalized (from a SEO point of view) because my links only appear on the sitemap.xml instead as in a list of anchors in the html page.
Note: the anchor approach was excluded because I have about 5,000 listed cities
It won't be penalised. Google themselves say the primary purpose of a sitemap is "a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover."
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en
You are rare in that you are using the sitemap correctly to help Google find your pages.
Often SEOs just add one for the sake of it, rather than taking the time to identify and using it to fix potential crawling errors.
The only negative aspect for SEO I can think of is that page rank will not flow between your pages if there is no direct link.
No, you will not be penalized. The sole purpose of sitemaps is to tell search engines where to find your content. That content may or may not be available through hyperlinks on your website.
We have a ton of content on our website which a user can get to by performing a search on the website. For example, we have data for all Public companies, in the form of individual pages per company. So think like 10,000 pages in total. Now in order to get to these pages, a user needs to search for the company name and from the search results, click on the company name they are interested in.
How would a search bot find this page? There is no page on the website which has links to these 10,000 pages. Think amazon, you need to search for your product and then from the search results, click on the product you are interested in to get to it.
The closest solution I could find was the sitemap.xml, is that it? Anything which doesn't require adding 10,000 links to an xml file?
You need to link to a page, or for it to be close to the homepage for it to stand a decent chance of getting indexed by Google.
A sitemap helps, sure, but a page still needs to exist in the menu / site structure. A sitemap reference alone does not guarantee a resource will be indexed.
Google - Webmaster Support on Sitemaps: "Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it."
If you browse Amazon, it will be possible to find 99% of the products available. Amazon do a lot of interesting stuff in their faceted navigation, you could write a book on it.
Speak to an SEO or a usability / CRO expert - they will be able to tell you what you need to do - which is basically create a user friendly site with categories & links to all your products.
An XML sitemap pretty much is your only on-site option if you do not or cannot link to these products on your website. You could link to these pages from other websites but that doesn't seem like a likely scenario.
Adding 10,000 products to an XML sitemap is easy to do. Your sitemap can be dynamic just like your web pages are. Just generate it on the fly when requested like you would a regular web page and include whatever products you want to be found and indexed.
My website has a very large no of pages. I am looking to create an XML Sitemap that contains only the most important pages (category pages etc).
However, on crawling the website in a tool like Xenu (the others have a 500 page limit), I am unable to control which pages get added to the XML Sitemap, and which ones get excluded.
Essentially, I only want pages that are upto 4 clicks away from my homepage to show up in the XML Sitemap.
How should I create an XML sitemap, and at the same time control which pages of my site I add to it (category pages), and which ones I remove (product pages etc).
Thanks in advance!
Do not create the XML-Sitemap on your own. You just cannot do it every other day, i.e. contents will become invalid over time.
At least Bing has a very tight tolerance limit when it comes to invalid URLs there:
If we see more than 1% of the URLs in a given sitemap returning errors, we begin to distrust the sitemap and stop visiting it.
Let your CMS create the XML-Sitemap for you, if possible. If not: It's ok. It's not a problem if your site is missing a sitemap. (In the vast majority of the cases) you won't rank better just because of having one.