To include in Sitemap or not to include?

[HB17]

Hello all,

A bit of a confusing one but please bear with me...

On our website we have a Used Cars section where each morning a feed is loaded onto our site with any changes to the stock. Some cars may have been sold and removed, some new cars may be added, some prices may be changed, every day every morning this very large section of our website is updated.

The question I have is, should I be including these urls in my sitemap? The Used Cars section is a huge portion of our website content and is our most important area, the Used Cars overview is our most frequently visited page.

The reason I ask is because of course Google might crawl and see car X, but tomorrow car X could be gone and be replaced with car Y. Should I be even mentioning these pages to Google if by tomorrow some of those urls could be gone? It's always changing and it's something we don't have control of.

Thanks!

[Keszi]

Hi Michele,

First of all, I would try to include it in sitemap. Than I'd do the following:

1. For all the cars that you have sold, I'd try to implement a noindex, follow (and keep the page alive for the following few days, giving time to Google to crawl these URLs again).
2. Every day a sitemap should be generated, then pinged (check Google's "best practices for sitemaps" article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ro/2014/10/best-practices-for-xml-sitemaps-rssatom.html and the ping protocol: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#submit_ping)

That's my personal approach. But might be that others come up with better ideas.

I hope it helped.

Gr., Keszi

[EcommerceSite]

I would put the content in the sitemap, and once the cars are gone I would remove the items from the sitemap and put up 301 redirects to either the car category page or a similar page. The article below does a pretty good job explaining.

http://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content

[HB17]

Thank you for your suggestions!

Essentially, yes we want to tell Google this page is there, but to not 'trick it' and then that page disappears just as Google finds it resulting in a 404.

We're going to get a sitemap generated each day as so much content changes on the site anyway, but No Indexing and 301'ing is something we'll then give a go.

I'll keep you posted on progress!

Thanks!