Questions
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If I can't list my canonical URLs in my sitemap, will I be creating duplicate content?
Hi Yannick, I realize that you can't solve duplicate content issues with a sitemap, but an XML sitemap does (according to my understanding) tell Google how to organize the site's pages -- and in the case of a site that has too many URLs on it for Google to crawl them all, I imagine it would also influence the priority assigned to the indexing of a given page (meaning that a URL listed in the sitemap would likely not be skipped over by Google, but some random, less important search results page not on the sitemap may be overlooked). Unfortunately I'm not sure that we can so easily shrug off the whole dupe content issue, since we are talking dozens of URLs per page of content. So, so many. There's no way Google can handle all of it, and our SEO link juice has got to be so diluted as to be useless. So we'd really like to fix this if at all possible. Do you have any advice re: whether to go one direction (XML sitemap with URLs that do not match our "vanity" desired canonicals) or another (rel="canonical" for our pretty vanity SEO'd URLs)? Or both? We've got neither at the moment. Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emilyburns0 -
How does a sitemap affect the definition of canonical URLs?
Thank you for your responses. We use Endeca, but while they have a site map generator, for whatever reason they are unable to produce URLs that match our new SEO-friendly vanity URLs. Right now we've had no site map for months, as we're waiting to try and find a solution to this problem. From what I'm gathering, this is the right approach? As in, it would do more harm than good to upload a "bad" sitemap. Yes? Also, there seems to be no way to get around this with a clever redirect scheme. Am I right in this also? In which case, it may boil down to choosing between an accurate sitemap and SEO'd URLs. Not sure which would be more important. Website's here, if that's useful: www.pli.edu
Technical SEO Issues | | emilyburns0