Multilingual Sitemaps

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Hey there, I have a site with many languages. So here are my questions concerning the sitemaps. The correct way of creating a sitemap for a multilingual site is as followed ( by the official blog of Google )

<urlset xmlns="</span>http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

http://www.example.com/loc>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="</span>http://www.example.com/"/>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="</span>http://www.example.com/de"/>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="</span>http://www.example.com/fr"/><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" fr"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" de"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"="" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></urlset>

**So here is my first question. My site has over 200.000 pages that all of them support around 5-6 languages. Am I suppose to do this example 200.000 times?****My second question is. My root domain is www.example.com but this one redirects with 301 to www.example.com/en should the sitemap be at ****www.example.com/sitemap.xmlorwww.example.com/en/sitemap.xml ???****My third question is as followed. On WMT do I submit my sitemap in all versions of my site? I have all my languages there.**Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond to this thread and by creating it I hope many people will solve their own questions.

[RyanPurkey]

Kate Morris wrote a nice post on how to break up sitemaps for large sites a few years ago, but it still holds true today: http://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic, so following the advice there should help on your first question.

Your 301 redirect to English should probably be a 302 and based on browser language settings.  Is it possible for anyone to get to a file or folder at www.example.com/whatever...?

Third, see the blog mentioned above. She gets into the details of how to create an Index format for your soon to be many sitemaps.  Cheers!

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

It is indeed a great article but certainly does not answer any of my questions ( or i havent read the article correct )

My first question is: Do i have to do this

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/"/>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" de"="" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/de"/>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" fr"="" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/fr"/></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link>

for all my 200.000 + sitemap pages?

Thanks Ryan for taking the time to answer

[RyanPurkey]

Per Google's recommendations here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en, yes you want to have pages correctly tagged with their alternate language translations. Per the blog I cited earlier, you'll want to organize the sitemaps to break out the 200.000 pages in a structure that's more refined than just 'all', specifically in ways that will help you find if there are problems creeping up in one section or another. Good luck!

[katemorris]

Thanks for the shout out Ryan!

Hi Angelos.

1. The short answer is yes, you should do all of those entries. Annoying right?

The best way to go about this is going to be writing a script to do the heavy lifting, but I am not cool enough to tell you how to do that. The idea would be to make one sitemap in one language, and if the URLs are identical except for the language code, then changing up everything for the next language and moving on one at a time.

You should have one main sitemap per language if you can get all of your content into one sitemap. Then have one sitemap index hosted at domain.com/sitemap.xml.

If that's not possible due to the sheer number of pages, do a sitemap index per language that references multiple sitemaps to cover the content in that one language. Then have another sitemap index that references the other indices per language.

2.  See above. The main sitemap index should be at domain.com/sitemap.xml, BUT you can have each language sitemap hosted in each subfolder. Example: English sitemap at domain.com/en/sitemap.xml and Spanish sitemap at domain.com/es/sitemap.xml. This requires listing many sitemaps in the main robots.txt file or having a robots file for each subfolder. It's a lot more work than working with sitemap indices.

3. If you have claimed all language subfolders as independent sites in WMT, you can submit the corresponding sitemap. You don't have to put the sitemaps in the subfolders to do this though, you can still use the indices. You also don't have to submit them all individually, but you can and I would as I would want to see the index information in each corresponding account. That's just me though.

Does that all help?

[kirstybethkb]

GHi Kate,

Does your advice on points 2 and 3 also apply to location targeted subfolders? We have a separate subfolder for all of the countries we deliver to outside of the UK at www.example.co.uk/row however the content is in the same language from our uk site.

We have claimed this as a separate property on Google Search Console.

I realise it’s years later but hopefully someone is able to answer this query

I did read your article https://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic but wasn’t sure if it is the same when trying to target specific countries with a subfolder.

Thanks in advance.

[katemorris]

Ah, yes! If you have multiple locations, but the same content in each location you would want to submit a sitemap per country-specific area. However, is your domain on .co.uk? If you are trying to target other countries that are not the UK with that ccTLD, you are going to have a hard time as that is specific to the UK.

However, if you are on a gTLD (general domain), and have country-specific folders, you should have a sitemap per country.

[kirstybethkb]

Thank you so much for replying to me.

Sorry I’ve just realise I’ve made a mistake in my first comment. We are using .com for our main site and we plan to add subfolders for individual countries in the future. Currently, we only have /row for all the countries outside of the UK that we deliver to.

Thanks again for getting back!