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.
Hreflang in vs. sitemap?
-
Hi all,
I decided to identify alternate language pages of my site via sitemap to save our development team some time. I also like the idea of having leaner markup.
However, my site has many alternate language and country page variations, so after creating a sitemap that includes mostly tier 1 and tier 2 level URLs, i now have a sitemap file that's 17mb. I did a couple google searches to see is sitemap file size can ever be an issue and found a discussion or two that suggested keeping the size small and a really old article that recommended keeping it < 10mb.
Does the sitemap file size matter? GWT has verified the sitemap and appears to be indexing the URLs fine.
Are there any particular benefits to specifying alternate versions of a URL in vs. sitemap?
Thanks,
-Eugene
-
I have always preferred in the sitemap because it keeps potential lines of code off your page. Everything helps when it comes to page speed.
However, if it's easier for you to put the tags on page, that's is completely valid. Do whatever is easiest to maintain and update.
-
First off if you want to keep the sitemap file, consider breaking it down to multiple files, one for each language/country etc...
Also FYI there are THREE methods, you can also add hreflang to the http header. This might be a good options as well to consider.
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
-
Absolute vs. Relative Canonical Links
Hi Moz Community, I have a client using relative links for their canonicals (vs. absolute) Google appears to be following this just fine, but bing, etc. are still sending organic traffic to the non-canonical links. It's a drupal setup. Anyone have advice? Should I recommend that all canonical links be absolute? They are strapped for resources, so this would be a PITA if it won't make a difference. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch1 -
This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location error using pro-sitemaps.com
Hey, guys, We are using the pro-sitemaps.com tool to automate our sitemaps on our properties, but some of them give this error "This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location" for all the urls. Strange thing is that not all of them are with the error and most have all the urls indexed already. Do you have any experience with the tool and what is your opinion? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lgrozeva0 -
Sitemap: unique sitemap or different sitemaps by Country
Hi guys, i have a question about sitemaps. We are doing an international site, e.x. www.offers.com for landing page and www.offers.com/br for brazil, www.offers.com/it for italy, etc... i don't if we should do an unique sitemap for all countries or separate sitemaps by country, e.x.: unique sitemap: www.offers.com/sitemap.xml - including all sitemaps www.offers.com/br/sitemap.xml - sitemap for brazil market only. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thekiller990 -
P.O Box VS. Actual Address
We have a website (http://www.delivertech.ca) that uses a P.O Box number versus an actual address as their "location". Does this affect SEO? Is it better to use an actual address? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
How to handle a blog subdomain on the main sitemap and robots file?
Hi, I have some confusion about how our blog subdomain is handled in our sitemap. We have our main website, example.com, and our blog, blog.example.com. Should we list the blog subdomain URL in our main sitemap? In other words, is listing a subdomain allowed in the root sitemap? What does the final structure look like in terms of the sitemap and robots file? Specifically: **example.com/sitemap.xml ** would I include a link to our blog subdomain (blog.example.com)? example.com/robots.xml would I include a link to BOTH our main sitemap and blog sitemap? blog.example.com/sitemap.xml would I include a link to our main website URL (even though it's not a subdomain)? blog.example.com/robots.xml does a subdomain need its own robots file? I'm a technical SEO and understand the mechanics of much of on-page SEO.... but for some reason I never found an answer to this specific question and I am wondering how the pros do it. I appreciate your help with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo.owl0 -
External 404 vs Internal 404
Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0 -
Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?
We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking. Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps? Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0