Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I've heard it both ways, that a sitemap is a way around the digits in the URL. But I can confirm, for sure, that if you are approved by Google News (must submit for approval), that the digits in the URL will work for sure.

Jen - I agree with Eli.  It's best not to use the TM symbol in a URL string  - it will confuse the end user when it's URL encoded and scrambled.  Rather, put the mark on your pages and in images. If you have gone through the registration process with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), you should be using the  symbol next to your mark, and not the TM symbol. According to the Trademark FAQs on the USPTO site: http://www.uspto.gov/faq/trademarks.jsp#_Toc275426682 Do federal regulations govern the use of the designations "TM" or "SM" or the symbol? If you claim rights to use a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim of a “common-law” mark.  No registration is necessary to use a "TM" or "SM" symbol and you may continue to use these symbols even if the USPTO refuses to register your mark.  Those symbols put people on notice that you claim rights in the mark, although common law doesn't give you all the rights and benefits of federal registration. You may only use the federal registration symbol "" after the USPTO actually registers a mark, not while an application is pending.  And it may only be used on or in connection with the goods/services listed in the federal trademark registration and while the registration is still alive (you may not continue to use it if you don’t maintain the registration or it expires).  Although there are no specific requirements on where the symbol should be placed relative to the mark, most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark.  Note: Because several foreign countries use “” to indicate that a mark is registered in that country, use of the symbol by the holder of a foreign registration may be proper. From another section_:  There are no specific requirements on where the “” symbol should be placed relative to the mark, but most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark._ Hope this helps! -- Jeff

In my experience, the html sitemap does not effect SEO as far as indexing the site, assuming you have good XML sitemap and a good link structure.  I I would say that the sole reason to provide an html sitemap is UX, but that is a huge reason to do it.  Anything that upgrades your UX, also has the potential to boost your SEO. Making the full site easy to see and easy to explore will encourage longer site visits and more page views, and that effects your value in the eyes of the search engines. To expand on what Branden said, specialized sitemaps are a very good idea.  Seeing as you were hoping to get rid of a sitemap this may not be what you want to hear but you really should have a sitemap for each type of content you have. Mobile | Video | News | Images | TV Shows and of course your general web sitemap Take a moment to learn about each of them as you will want to understand each maps expectations.  ie. You should never have anything on a news sitemap that is older than 2 days and Google will reject anything that does not meet it's criteria. Here is the Google Resource that explains it all.

It really depends how they are being served to the users and the bots. do you always display them ? Why is it causing a 403 / Forbidden error code ? Post / PM me the URL and that would make it easy to check and suggest accordingly.

As long as there's a reference to the XML sitemap, in either configuration, you should be fine with the one sitemap.

We had a very similar issue. To solve it I did just as Elias suggested, I created  a case statement in php and then generated as much unique / specific to selection content as possible. As much content that you can change while still being relevant to the person's click.. I would.

If Google robot can crawl this page and index it then of course it will be treated like any other page and the content will be count as duplicated. Let him at least to rewrite it.

No, these are 2 separate things. I installed Yoast, and in the advanced setting you add the canonical tag. Permalink makes page, into names, and not numbered pages. Hope it helps.

Nothing, you have already fixed the problem (assuming you are fixing duplicate content)

Thank you all for the responses. I hope they start supporting it soon.

Thanks for your reply EGOL. That's exactly what I saw with one of the posts that had nofollow links. The sydication partner's version was ranking higher.