Should 301-ed links be removed from sitemap?

[shawn81]

In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[pdangermond]

We have had a problem with this ourselves. We put a 301 redirect on our domain when we were building a new site (went from new. to www.) and search engines are still crawling the new. domain. Bing webmaster tools registers it as an error because they can't find the old site. I would lean toward removing it just because your users are probably being redirected somewhere they wouldn't necessarily want to go.

[Anti-Alex]

There shouldn't be any 301 links in a sitemap. A sitemap should only contain links to active pages. So in your case, you should remove all the 301 links and replace them with the new links.

Couple notes - Having 301 links in your sitemap won't hurt your site or SEO unless the sitemap is so huge that you need to split it up into multiple files. But you should really only have the final links in the sitemap, neither people nor bots want to be redirected around. If you properly 301'd the crawlers will automatically update their links.

Changing links around in the sitemap generally won't hurt your site. Especially if the links no longer exist and you're improving the list. There are very few cases where making changes will hurt the site.

[ShaMenz]

"A sitemap should only contain links to active pages."

Hi shawn81

Alex is absolutely correct there.

In fact, Duane Forrester has said repeatedly that Bing absolutely does not like to find such pages in a sitemap and that you should make sure there are never 3XX, 4XX or 5XX status pages included because it will stop Bingbot from crawling your site.

While Googlebot is not so sensitive, the reality is that all search engines allocate a certain amount of crawl capacity for your site...if your sitemaps include a load of pages that are not likely to be indexed, the result is twofold:

1. you are wasting capacity on useless pages and the crawler may never get to the stuff you really want indexed 
2. if the crawler encounters a lot of non-active pages when it crawls, future crawl capacity (not to mention trust) is likely to be reduced  

Replace the old URLs with the new and give the bots a little thrill of adventure 

Hope that helps,

Sha

[anthonydnelson]

I'm going to disagree a little bit with the other commenters. I've done quite a few large scale redirect projects and I'm not 100% opposed to using a "dirty sitemap" for a short duration. The better option is to leave some internal links pointed at the old URLs. I know what the search engines say, but I also know what I've experienced when it comes to getting 301'd links crawled again.

Read this post by Everett Sizemore for more info at what I'm describing:

http://moz.com/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well