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. … [Read more...] about Google: Sitemap Files Don’t Need To Be Indexed To Work
Google sitemap 50000
Google: Sitemap Dates vs Web Page Dates
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." … [Read more...] about Google: Sitemap Dates vs Web Page Dates
Google: Sitemaps Do Not Directly Impact Your Search Rankings
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. … [Read more...] about Google: Sitemaps Do Not Directly Impact Your Search Rankings
Google Sitemaps URL Order Does Not Matter
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. … [Read more...] about Google Sitemaps URL Order Does Not Matter
Never List URLs With Session IDs In A Google Sitemap
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. … [Read more...] about Never List URLs With Session IDs In A Google Sitemap