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You want your sitemap to include all your important URLs. Don't remove them from the sitemap just because you have been crawled.

Yes, unless you have a compelling reason to change them. By changing the names you are just creating more work for yourself. Was there a reason you were wanting to name them something different? Changing the name (if you choose to do so) of the sitemap is not going to have an effect on already-indexed URL's. I dont see any reason that you should modify the names unless you are trying to organize them better

"So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this." I would not recommend keeping it that way. You could mass redirect them to the sitemap page if they are passing PR and or some traffic, and there is no logical other place to point them. 404's are not really something that can hurt you, providing that they are coming from external sources and you aren't providing 404 links on your site to dead pages on your site, if there are these, then you should fix the internal links at the source.

The only thing I might add is that, depending on the business, it might be worth building a "Red Widgets" category (as an example). However, you would treat this like a sub-category and write its own category description. You would give it its own rel canonical tag, treating it as the root of the "Red Widgets" category root. Nine times out of ten it isn't necessary to give sorting and filtering options their own category page though, and a rel canonical tag to the canonical version of that page is the second best option. The first best option would be to not change the URL at all, only re-order the items, hiding some and featuring others. Most eCommerce platforms don't have this functionality at present, however. Rel Canonical was made to span the gap until they do.

Hello, You should include your sitemap.xml on the root of the site, it should include all pages crawleable from the root. Also I recommend on your robots.txt file include the line: Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml This xml file is one of your most important files to rank well. Hope it help Claudio

I agree with Andy. When thinking of the right strategy for page/content development that all target the same general terms, Google is moving toward thematic indexing, versus keyword by keyword.  As long as the collection of target terms on the page is pretty close (just like your example list), the page should rank well for all target terms (and probably some other ones you have not intentionally targeted). For your meta data, you could introduce a Title that incorporates all keywords such as "The Best New York Restaurants" and a description such as "The best restaurants in New York as voted by local residents.  See if your favorite New York restaurant is on the list.  Read reviews, submit your vote and more!" Then use each of your various terms 1-2 times at the most throughout the content.  Use your most valuable term in the first 50 words on the page.  Make sure the content is written for humans and not spiders.  the bots are getting very good at detecting this, so just as Andy said, the user experience should be your focus, not rank. Also, don't forget to add images and alt text that incorporates some of your keyword targets as well. Best of luck!

Hey There Bradley's answer is great. I just want to add, you really should only worry about the suggestions here - http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - in regards to Google and speed / UX factors that would affect ranking. You should also check for mobile errors in Webmaster Tools.

Hi, while I do not know why Yelp uses 303 but all that I can say is 303 does not pass the link juice and it is not recommended to be used in place of a 301 as 301 is the best way to pass on the link equity to the destination URL. Here you go for a small experiment that proves 303 redirection worthless. Hope this helps my friend. Best, Devanur Rafi

You are welcome. Hmmmm.. don't know about Yelp, I've seen others using 303 too, but still 302 seems to be the way to go.