After publishing my last post about dangerous rel canonical problems, I started receiving a lot of questions about other areas of technical SEO. One topic in particular that seemed to generate many questions was how to best use and set up xml sitemaps for larger and more complex websites.
Sure, in its most basic form, webmasters can provide a list of urls that they want the search engines to crawl and index. Sounds easy, right? Well, for larger and more complex sites, the situation is often not so easy. And if the xml sitemap situation spirals out of control, you can end up feeding Google and Bing thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of bad urls. And that’s never a good thing.
While helping clients, it’s not uncommon for me to audit a site and surface serious errors with regard to xml sitemaps. And when that’s the case, websites can send Google and Bing mixed signals, urls might not get indexed properly, and both engines can end up losing trust in your sitemaps. And as Bing’s Duane Forrester once said in this interviewwith Eric Enge:
“Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap. If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap.”
Clearly that’s not what you want happening…
So, based on the technical SEO work I perform for clients, including conducting many audits, I decided to list some important facts, tips, and answers for those looking to maximize their xml sitemaps. My hope is that you can learn something new from the bullets listed below, and implement changes quickly.
XML Sitemaps – 8 Facts, Tips, and Recommendations for the Advanced SEO
