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.
Should I include tags in sitemap?
-
Hello All,
I was wondering if you should include tags and categories in your sitemap. In the past on previous blogs I have always left tags and categories out. The reason for this is a good friend of mine who has been doing SEO for a long time and inhouse always told me that this would result in duplicate content.
I thought that it would be a great idea to get some input from the SEOmoz community as this obviously has a big affect on your blog and the number of pages indexed.
Any help would be great.
Thanks,
Luke Hutchinson.
-
Hi Dan The Yoast Seo plug in for Wordpress allows you to select what you want included on sitemaps. Mine currently includes posts, pages, categories, and video Are you suggesting to only include pages in the sitemap? Why wouldn't we want to include the others?
-
Hey Luke
Assume you mean XML Sitemap?
You should only include pages in your sitemap, which also are indexed. So then the question becomes, should you index tags or categories. I firmly believe, so long as the site is set up correctly, you should not index tags but it's OK to index categories. I also assume you're using WordPress.
So the steps become;
1. Noindex tag archives.
2. Then exclude tags from the XML sitemap.
You can refer to my WordPress SEO guide on Moz for more details.
Good luck!
-Dan
-
Luke,
at this moment a new website is developed for me using Modx CMS. In here I had build a blog because I want to start blogging too. The funny part of it is that in many cases blog software creates duplicate content if you post an article and also have it stored in the archives etc. Modx does not seem to be doing that (so far as I tested it).
Maybe that would be something too look into?
The archives should be linking to the same article as the overview page does. The more tags and the more categories helps the user define what they are looking for and that ought to be a good thing. Here in the SEOmoz community you can also filter out certain blog messages, for instance if you only want to see white-board Friday messages that's possible. And I believe that these do not result in duplicate content issues.
Hope this helps you
Regards
Jarno
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
-
Should internal links in my table of contents be tagged as nofollow?
Hi All, I have the LuckyWP Table of Contents plugin installed. I recently noticed that you can tag your internal links with and nofollow. I understand that it's always a good idea to link internally and to pass link juice to my own content. But with detailed posts that have over 20 headings, I'm thinking that internal linking for headings may actually hurt me because it takes my links well above 100. Any ideas what the best practises are in this scenario? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nomad_blogger0 -
Can a H1 Tag Have Multiple Spans Within It?
H1 tags on my client's website follow the template [Service] + [Location]. These two have their own span, meaning there are two spans in an H1 tag. class="what">Truck Repair near class="where">California, CA How do crawl bots see this? Is that okay for SEO?
Technical SEO | | kevinpark1910 -
Do you need a canonical tag for search and filter pages?
Hi Moz Community, We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below. www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Indexing product attributes in sitemap
Hey Mozzers! I'm battling a few questions about the sitemap for my ecommerce store. Could you help me out? Is it necessary to include your product attributes in the sitemap? I'm not sure why it would matter to have a sitemap that lists everything in the color cherry. Also, if the attributes were included in the sitemap, would that count as duplicate content for the same products to show up in multiple attributes? Is there any benefit to submitting the sitemaps individually? For example, submitting /product-sitemap.xml, /product_brand-sitemap.xml versus just /sitemap.xml? Any other best practices for managing my ecommerce sitemap, or great resources, would be very helpful. Thank you! a1vUz
Technical SEO | | localwork0 -
Hreflang tags with link to redirect loop
Hi guys, I'm having a bit of an issue on a client site that I'm hoping someone can help me with. Basically, the client has two domains, one serving users in the Republic of Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com), showing Euro prices, and the other serving users in Northern Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/) showing £ prices. The issue I'm having is that the URL for the Northern Ireland page has a 302 on it and goes through another 2/3 301 redirects until it resolves as http://www.americanholidays.com, however it does then show the £ prices. You can see the redirect chain here: http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&useragent=1&typeProtocol=11 The homepage is using the Hreflang tag, and pointing search engines to serve the http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/ page to users using EN-GB as their language. The page is also using a self-referencing canonical, which I believe may negate the whole Hreflang tag anyway? My main question is - is the fact that the Hreflang for the gb_en page is pointing to a chain of redirects negatively affecting it? (I understand too many redirects are never good). Also, is the canonical negating the Hreflang? Any help/info would be great as I just can't get my head around it! Thanks guys Daniel
Technical SEO | | DanielKiely60 -
301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap
Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing. You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page. Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice. Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!
Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
How to generate a visual sitemap using sitemap.xml
Are there any tools (online preferably) which will take a sitemap.xml file and generate a visual site map? Seems like an obvious thing to do, but can't find any simple tools for this?
Technical SEO | | k3nn3dy30