Indexing product attributes in sitemap

[localwork]

Hey Mozzers!

I'm battling a few questions about the sitemap for my ecommerce store. Could you help me out?

1. Is it necessary to include your product attributes in the sitemap? I'm not sure why it would matter to have a sitemap that lists everything in the color cherry. Also, if the attributes were included in the sitemap, would that count as duplicate content for the same products to show up in multiple attributes?
2. Is there any benefit to submitting the sitemaps individually? For example, submitting /product-sitemap.xml, /product_brand-sitemap.xml versus just /sitemap.xml?

Any other best practices for managing my ecommerce sitemap, or great resources, would be very helpful.

Thank you!

a1vUz

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

Without knowing a little more detail, it's hard to say with 100% certainty, but I can't see why the sitemap should have every iteration of a product in there. These pages (pages that are produced due to an attribute change) should rel=canonical back to the main product page anyway and this will handle duplication.

And unless you many many thousands of products in each sitemap, then you wouldn't want to be splitting them up like this, although you can rationalize these somewhat depending on the products and site.

Just remember that the sitemap is only there as an aid to helping Google crawl and there is no actual SEO benefit to this. It is whatever is going to make the most sense to the site and to Google.

-Andy

Edit: Just Tweeted this out as well to see if others wish to chime in

[Everett]

Hello Localwork,

By "product attributes" do you mean URLs associated with product variants, like color and size? From the context of your question, I'll assume for now you mean that each product attribute / variant appears on it's own URL (e.g. /?color=red and /?color=blue) and you want to know whether these should be included in the sitemap.

As Andy mentions below, more information is needed before prescribing a best practice specifically to your situation. However, in this case you should probably only have the one "canonical" version of the product URL (e.g. without variants). There are many ways to handle this and I recommend Googling "SEO for product variants" to familiarize yourself with the pros and cons of each.

To answer your question about sitemap segmentation, yes it is a good thing to do for several reasons, most important of which is easier diagnoses of crawl issues, such as which "sections" of your sites have indexation problems. It also helps on large sites with issues reaching URL limits in sitemaps, and is a more logical tree-like structure for people and machines to follow than having every URL in one sitemap.