Is this a good sitemap hierarchy for a big eCommerce site (50k+ pages).

[Brett-S]

Hi guys, hope you're all good.

I am currently in the process of designing a new sitemap hierarchy to ensure that every page on the site gets indexed and is accessible via Google. It's important that our sitemap file is well structured, divided and organised into relevant sub-categories to improve indexing.

I just wanted to make sure that it's all good before forwarding onto the development team for them to consider. At the moment the site has everything thrown into /sitemap.xml/ and it exceeds the 50k limit. Here is what I have came up with:

A primary sitemap.xml referencing other sitemap files, each of the following areas will have their own sitemap of which is referenced by /sitemap.xml/. As an example, sitemap.xml will contain 6 links, all of which link to other sitemaps.

• Product pages;
• Blog posts;
• Categories and sub categories;
• Forum posts, pages etc;
• TV specific pages (we have a TV show);
• Other pages.

Is this format correct? Once it has been implemented I can then go ahead and submit all 6 separate sitemaps to webmaster tools + add a sitemap link to the footer of the site.

All comments are greatly appreciated - if you know of a site which has a good sitemap architecture, please send the link my way!

Brett

[GastonRiera]

Hi brett,

Yeap, the hierarchy is ok. You should keep in mind to only submit to index the pages that are of yout interest and dont generate duplicate content, just a reminder.

Then, just submit every sitemap to search console.

Hope it helps.
GR.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Brett,

Don't forget to add an images sitemap, as Google is pretty hot on those, and make sure you do some good image marketing as well.

But what you suggest is absolutely fine. From the main Sitemap, Google will find all of the others as well.

Just as a note, do make sure you know which pages need more crawling through using the last modified date. This will help them know which pages they should be recrawling more often.

-Andy

[Brett-S]

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly Gaston, I appreciate it.

You mentioned duplicate content - what do you mean? If the page has already been indexed, Google will skip/re-crawl the page. Not too sure what you mean by that?

Brett

[GastonRiera]

Duplicate content is when two or more URLs show the same content.
I referred to the fact that sometime categories, tags or subcategories show the same content. By the latter, i mean the same posts.

Just to clarify, imagine that you have a category: Dogs and the subcategory: Puppies. And the last 5 articles/posts have both, category and subcategory.
When visiting the main page fo both(cat and subcat) will show the same content, the same 5 posts/articles

Did I make myself clear?

[Brett-S]

Interesting, I haven't ever came across someone who said that I should put image URL's in a sitemap. Do users really search via Google images though - if they do aren't they just looking to copy an image / and or download it?

I can't see the site generating qualified leads through image based searches.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Have a read of what Google say about them here.

And yes, image search is huge. As for the way it's used, I can't comment on what everyone else does.

-Andy