“What URLs should you put in the XML sitemap of your website /
blog?" The three confusion and non-overlapping options are (a) everything,
(b) just the important pages or (c) URLs that have not been crawled and indexed
yet.
Sitemaps, as you know, is a simple
text file in XML format that contains a list of URLs that are part of a
website. It’s extremely important that you create sitemaps of your site for two
reasons:
1. They help you bring certain pages to the notice of search engines that
may otherwise be ignored.
2. If there are duplicate URL issues with your site (for instance if
abc.com?p=123 & abc.com/123/ point to the same page), you may use Sitemaps
to specify the version that get preference in search engines.
Search Suchter of
Yahoo! web search team
recently suggested that webmasters
should put only the important pages in the sitemap, rather than every page
of the website because Yahoo uses sitemaps for figuring out which pages are
valuable on a site.
I asked Vanessa
Fox about her
opinion on what should really go in a Sitemap and her preferred
approach is that website owners should put a comprehensive list of URLs
in the Sitemap.
"Why not tell search engines what the definitive list of pages on
your site is? Why limit it to really important ones? One benefit to this is
that there’s at least one place other than crawling that Sitemaps can be
helpful, and that’s canonicalization. If a search engine has detected that
several URLs display the same page, the version of the URL that’s in the
Sitemap is a signal as to which is the canonical version."
Now this may sound like contradictory opinion and unfortunately, one site
can’t maintain multiple sitemaps to fit the needs of all search engines so what
may help here is, as Vanessa points out, if search engines can give us more
details about how they use sitemaps and what are some of the best
"common" practices.
Until that happens, I will probably continue to dump all URL in my XML
sitemap including pages for tags and categories which are not very important
from organic rankings point-of-view.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Add Comment