Sitemap Question - E-commerce - Magento

[Prime85]

Good Morning...

I have an ecommerce site running on Magento and the sitemap is automatically generated by Magento based on the categories and sub categories and products.

I have recently created new categories that i want to replace the old categories, but they are both in the auto-generated sitemap.  The old categories are "active" (as in still exist if you know the URL to type) but not visible (you can't find it just by navigating through the site).  The new category pages are active and visible...

If i want Google to rank one page (the new category page) and not the old page (old category page) should i remove the old page from the sitemap?  Would removing the old page that used to target the same keywords improve my rankings on the newer category page?

Sitemap currently contains:

www.example.com/oldcategorypage

www.example.com/newcategorypage

Did I confuse you yet?

Any help or guidance is appreciated.

Thanks,

[iFong]

Is there a reason you need to keep those old categories? In magento you can rename the category and the URL into your new category and it will automatically 301 redirect it to whatever new category URL structure you give it, passing SEO value along.

[Prime85]

Hey Ian, thanks for the response.

The new categories have already been created so it seems like it's too late to rename the older categories and urls.

Question is should i remove the ones i don't want to rank from the sitemap...

Thanks

[iFong]

First thing would be to 301 redirect old to new so the new pages have the chance to rank. If you don't you might also run into keyword cannibalisation issues where both old and new try to rank for the same keywords.

In Magento I believe if you disable the old category, it will also be removed the in sitemap.xml it generates for you.

If you're generating the sitemap manually then yes definitely remove them from the sitemap after the redirects.