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.
Sitemap with homepage URL repeated several times - it is a problem?
-
Hello Mozzers,
I am looking at a website with the homepage repeated several times (4 times) on the sitemap (sitemap is autogenerated via a plugin) - is this an SEO problem do you think - might it damage SEO performance, or can I ignore this issue?
I am thinking I can ignore, yet it's an odd "issue" so your advice would be welcome!
Thanks, Luke
-
Many thanks Eric - much appreciated - that clarifies everything perfectly

-
Generally speaking, this is normal, and you shouldn't have to worry about it. There's a Google Webmaster thread that pointed to this issue specifically, and Google gave an official response (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitemaps-duplicate-16128.html)
"This is apparently normal if you submit Sitemap files with the same URLs listed multiple times. Since submitting the same URLs multiple times doesn't change anything with regards to your site's crawling & indexing, I'd just submit it once if you want the correct counts (alternately, if the count doesn't bother you, you can also just leave it like this."
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
-
Keyword difficulty and time to rank
Hello, Is there a correlation between the keyword difficult and the time it takes to rank ? In other words let's say I try to rank for the keyword "seo" and it is going to take 2 years to rank 1 st whereas if I go for "best seo tools in 2018" and it takes just 2 weeks ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Help with facet URLs in Magento
Hi Guys, Wondering if I can get some technical help here... We have our site britishbraces.co.uk , built in Magento. As per eCommerce sites, we have paginated pages throughout. These have rel=next/prev implemented but not correctly ( as it is not in is it in ) - this fix is in process. Our canonicals are currently incorrect as far as I believe, as even when content is filtered, the canonical takes you back to the first page URL. For example, http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html?ajaxcatalog=true&brand=380&max=51.19&min=31.19 Canonical to... http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html Which I understand to be incorrect. As I want the coloured filtered pages to be indexed ( due to search volume for colour related queries ), but I don't want the price filtered pages to be indexed - I am unsure how to implement the solution? As I understand, because rel=next/prev implemented ( with no View All page ), the rel=canonical is not necessary as Google understands page 1 is the first page in the series. Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black ) But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs ? Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior? My head is a little confused here and I know we have an issue because our amount of indexed pages is increasing day by day but to no solution of the facet urls. Can anybody help - apologies in advance if I have confused the matter. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr0 -
Problem with redirects in coldfusion
How to redirect pages in cold fusion? If using ColdFusion and modrewrite, the URL will never be redirected from ModRewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
Magento Trailing Slash URL Problem
Howdy Mozzers! Our magento store URL's are accessible with or without a trailing slash at the end. Canonical's and 301 redirects are not set up for one of them at the moment. Will this cause duplicate issue? Do we need to set canonical or 301 up? Which one is recommended? MozAddict
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Is using dots in URL path really a problem?
we have a couple of pages displaying a dot in the URL path like domain.com/mr.smith/widget-mr.smith It displays fine in chrome, firefox and IE and for the user it may actually look better than replacing it by _ or -. Did this ever cause problems to anybody?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Any statement from google about it?
Should I change existing URLs? If so, which other characters can I use in the URL instead of underscore and dash, since in our system dash and underscore are already used for rewriting other characters. Thanks0 -
XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index
We have a similar problem to http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-a-xml-sitemap-index-point-to-other-sitemaps-indexes Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes? According to the "Unique Doll Clothing" example on this link, it seems possible http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic Can someone share an XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index example? We are looking for the format to implement the same on our website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lakshdeep0 -
Where to link to HTML Sitemap?
After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions. Should you have an HTML sitemap? If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from? Should you use a noindex, follow tag? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy290