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My Tech lead is concerned that his use of a script to generate XML sitemaps for some client sites may be causing negative issues for those sites.

His concern centers around the fact that the script generates a sitemap which indicates that every URL page in the site was last modified at the exact same date and time. I have never heard anything to indicate that this might be a problem, but I do know that the sitemaps I generate for other client sites can choose server response or not.

What is the best way to generate the sitemap? Last mod from actual time modified, or all set at one date and time?

A couple of thoughts -

1. First is along the lines of the latter part of Tait's answer, but just a little different:
   Leave up all of the free questions for a limited time (ie 60 days), making it clear that a selection of the more challenging/interesting questions may be answered within that time period, but with clickable options on each one to enable users to escalate it to either 14 days, 24 hours or 15 mins (when online) by paying the appropriate fee. This would allow other people with the same question to see it and escalate it to get an answer that may help everyone.

2. Second is to set a limit on the number of free questions accepted each day and have the site indicate when the day's quota of free questions is filled. If people really want an answer they will pay, or get in earlier tomorrow to ask it for free.

Hi,

Just a few things to start...

• Use your name ... IAC is not automatically known to the world and since your name includes what you do, I would lose the abbreviation in most instances and take advantage of the value inherent in your name.
• rename your page files using targeted keyword phrase for each page
• follow the advice Daniel posted

Hope that helps

Hi Aran,

Thanks ... that is pretty much what I was thinking, just blew my mind when I saw it so wanted to check my reasoning.

The second domain is basically a part of the other site (which represents a niche), so I am thinking that those pages in the main site should reference the same pages in the niche site.

Your suggestion of using canonicals is slightly different from my initial solution - thought I should use 301 redirects so that juice is passed to the pages on the second domain. Is there a reason why you would use canonicals rather than 301's?

I have just discovered a client site that is serving content from a single database into two separate domains and has created xml sitemaps which contain references to both domains in an attempt to avoid being tagged for duplicate content.

I always thought that a sitemap was intended to show the files inside a single domain and the idea of multiple domains in the sitemap had never occurred to me...

The sites are both very large storefronts and one of them (the larger of the two) has recently seen a 50% drop in search traffic and loss of some 600 search terms from top 50 positions in Google. My first instinct is that the sitemaps should be altered to only show files within each domain, but am worried about causing further loss of traffic.

Is it possible that the inclusion URLs for the second domain in the sitemap may in fact be signalling duplicate content to Search Engines? Does anyone have a definitive view of whether these sitemaps are good, bad or irrelevant?

Hi Anton,

If it happens to be an OsCommerce Store, there are modules out there that you can install which allow you to see and manually edit Category and Product Titles and Tags in the catalog section of your admin panel. Just check out the Oscommerce community pages for one that suits you.

In the situation where you are using product feeds which often provide identical titles and descriptions you can just edit the ones you want to change - what you don't manually edit simply uses the information from the product description.

If you are not using a standard installation like OsCommerce or some other shopping cart software that has these modules available you can get a programmer to write you a simple script which allows you to do the same thing (or write it yourself if you have the skills). We have several client sites that are dynamic (some wordpress, some custom php etc) where this has been a problem and our programmer has written me a script which provides a web interface which allows me to edit titles, tags and content as I wish. It is a fairly simple process (according to him!)

Hope this helps.

Thanks for your responses Alan.

Since these are client sites, it is our policy to seek permission before sharing information about site status. I will do this and provide some examples once permission has been obtained.

Well none of those things would appear to be an issue. However, all of them are small sites created for very small businesses.and so have only 5 or 7 pages (with a good amount of information on the pages). Perhaps the overall size of the site is a factor.

Have you noticed any bias against smaller sites in your research?

I decided not to worry too much about the statements from google indicating that they were going to consider key word rich domains as a negative for ranking since any of the sites I work on that have them are totally relevant to the content on the sites.

However, since recent Google algorithm updates I see these domains have suddenly slid from top 3 positions to page 4 or beyond in Google SERP's. Nothing has changed on these sites in the intervening time and no change is evident in Bing or Yahoo SERP's.

Is it just my imagination, or are others seeing the same thing for keyword rich domains? and has anyone yet determined the best way to deal with this problem?

I'm a very small fish in the SEO world, but managing to achieve rankings, traffic and conversions on a number of sites by following the basic principles, so don't believe that SEO is dead.

With so much work and effort, if you don't even have a single keyword in the Top 50, then my first thought is that you have chosen to pursue keywords that are way too competitive. Since you refer to "keywords of value", this seems likely. Maybe a review of your keyword strategy is a possible place to start.