Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2012 9:31 am Post subject: SEO Problem: Broken/Outdated sitemaps
SEO Problem: Broken/Outdated sitemaps
Whilst not essential, XML sitemaps are very useful to the search engines to make sure they can find all URLs that you care about. They can give the search engines a nudge in the right direction. Unfortunately, some XML sitemaps are generated one-time-only and quickly become outdated, causing them to contain broken links and not contain new URLs.
Ideally, your XML sitemaps should be updated regularly so that broken URLs are removed and new URLs are added. This is more important if you're a large website that adds new pages all the time. Bing has also said that they have a threshold for "dirt" in a sitemap and if the threshold is hit, they will not trust it as much.
How to solve:
First, you should do an audit of your current sitemap to find broken links. This great tool from Mike King can do the job.
Second, you should speak to your developers about making your XML sitemap dynamic so that it updates regularly. Depending on your resources, this could be once a day, once a week, or once a month. There will be some development time required here, but it will save you (and them) plenty of time in the long run.
An extra tip here: you can experiment and create sitemaps which only contain new products and have these particular sitemaps update more regularly than your standard sitemaps. You could also do a bit of extra-lifting if you have dev resources to create a sitemap which only contains URLs which are not indexed. _________________ seo company uk
I’ve just read an article about how it’s important to have an HTML sitemap to ensure Google indexes all of your webpages, while I agree with this to a certain extent I certainly don’t think it’s always essential, especially for small websites. My way of thinking is that your site structure should be made simple, using intuitive categories to help both users and the search engines to find your content easily.
Looking at two very large UK websites the BBC and eBay they organise their website’s very well with clear navigational categories. But in addition to this eBay uses an overall sitemap while the BBC has sitemaps for each sub-section. Are these needed? From an SEO point of view I would say no, Google should have no problem finding each webpage but I guess the decision is based upon the user. If the site analytics are showing that users regularly visit and navigate webpages through the sitemap it’s definitely useful if not then perhaps it’s unnecessary. _________________ DJs Chicago dj services Chicago
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