Google sitemap 50000

This is a bit heartwarming - to see John Mueller back up Joost de Valk and Yoost when someone incorrectly claimed their was a bug with the Yoast SEO plugin causing major Google issues. John from Google came in and backed up Joost, confirming Joost and telling the plugin creator his plugin is not needed.John explained that XML sitemaps do not need to be indexed to work. Noindexing a Sitemap file is irrelevant because they are not really web pages. Here is Joost's post: The plugin wrote "Our latest release fixes Yoast SEO which has been tied to site visibility being affected in Google rankings." But there was no specific issue that needed fixing here.John confirmed it by saying: The plugin creator then closed the plugin, as the plugin now says "This plugin was closed on January 28, 2019 and is no longer available for download."Forum discussion at Twitter. … [Read more...] about Google: Sitemap Files Don’t Need To Be Indexed To Work

John Mueller from Google explained on Twitter the difference between the timestamp date in an XML Sitemaps lasmod date and the date on a web page. John said the sitemaps lastmod is when the page as a whole was last changed for crawling/indexing. The date on page is the date to be associated with the primary content on the page.John Mueller first said "A page can change without its primary content changing." He said that doesn't think "crawling needs to be synced to the date associated with the content." The example he gave was for "site redesigns or site moves are pretty clearly disconnected from the content date." He then added this tweet: So there you have it.Forum discussion at Twitter. … [Read more...] about Google: Sitemap Dates vs Web Page Dates

Gary Illyes from Google said that XML Sitemap files do not directly impact your rankings in Google Search. This is not new news but I like how he said "No, not direct anyway" to answer the question.Here are those tweets where the question asked was "Gary, is there a problem/ranking disadvantage not using a sitemap.xml at all?" We know Google said removing XML Sitemaps doesn't hurt a site and changing the XML Sitemaps location also shouldn't hurt one's rankings. So not having a sitemap file also won't hurt.XML Sitemaps help Google discover the URLs on your web site. Google ranks those URLs but the XML Sitemap file is about Google discovering those URLs, not directly ranking those URLs. Crawling, indexing and ranking are different things.Forum discussion at Twitter. … [Read more...] about Google: Sitemaps Do Not Directly Impact Your Search Rankings

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that the order of the URLs in your XML Sitemap files does not matter. He did say that you probably should save the "start of the file for the most awesome URLs." But he later added that "the order among them doesn't matter." He then clarified to make it clear "the order in the sitemap file doesn't matter at all." He said the awesome comment was that your web pages should be awesome in general.Here is his tweet:Save the start of the file for the most awesome URLs -- the order among them doesn't matter. Ideally, that covers your whole site already, so you're all set!— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) June 13, 2018 Vanessa Fox responded on Twitter as follows:Yes, John - tell us more! Why put the most awesome URLs at the beginning of the file? (That can be difficult to with programmatic files generated for large sites, but also, you know that will lead to the mad dash trying to figure out how many Google considers … [Read more...] about Google Sitemaps URL Order Does Not Matter

Google's JohnMu warned one webmaster over the New Years break in a Google Webmaster Help thread to never ever list URLs with session IDs in the Sitemap XML file.John said:If you are not submitting clean URLs in your Sitemap file, you'd be better off not using a Sitemap file. With session-IDs in there, it'll cause more problems (with us crawling and indexing those URLs) than if you just let us crawl your website normally (especially if you really have a clean URL structure). So my advice would be to either delete the Sitemap file, or make sure that the submitted URLs are really exactly the same, clean ones that we find while crawling.To most of us, this is obvious. But sometimes the obvious needs to be said.Sending Google duplicate URLs for the same landing page is asking for trouble. Why hand Google duplicate content on a silver plater? That is what you are doing when you are listing these URLs in a Sitemap file. If you have duplicate content on your site, and you don't block it … [Read more...] about Never List URLs With Session IDs In A Google Sitemap