3 replies to this topic

[MarcP]

Ok I think I might have an issue in webmaster tools. Let me give a jist.

www.example.org and example.org both go to same URL however it shows up as http://example.org when I use http://www.example.org

In webmaster tools it's in there as http://www.example.org

My sitemap only works with http://example.org/sitemap.xml. It doesn't work as http://www.example.org

I'm getting data though from how it's in webmaster tools as http://www.example.org

How do I get my sitemap to work in this situation?

Thanks!

[Jill]

Not positive, but I think you can set up a new WMT account for the non-www version, which should help.

[JJChavez]

I have a sitemap question as well.

 

I work for a company with a large website.  We operate in multiple countries with multiple languages and we serve our pages out of a robust CMS system.  I'm struggling with how to deploy sitemaps correctly.  We have recently updated our site to include the canonical tag because there were so many ways to get to a single page regardless of language and in the process we also began developing language specific sitemaps.  The issue however is that our sitemaps being generated are not exact matches to the navigation structure of the site.  I've submitted some examples below.  The reason they are different is because language & country preferences are selected by the end user and are saved with the setting of a cookie.  If we don't specify a language code in the sitemap then the only pages delivered to the engine are english.

 

Examples:

Navigation Link:  domain.com/en/product-classification/product-name?pageid=12345&cc=US&lc=eng

        (note: pageid is required to ensure the right page is pulled out of the database.  cc=country code & lc= language code)

 

Canonical Link:  domain.com/en/product-classification/product-name

Sitemap Link:     domain.com/en/product-classification/product-name?Locale=US-eng

         (note: almost same as canonical with the exception of adding the locale parameter so we can deliver the right version of the page to the spider).

 

For all these you can replace the /en/ with whatever the language is we are targeting (i.e. /br/ /ru/ /cn/ etc.  Also the locale in the sitemap matches to the language designator in the url /en/ = locale us-eng, /ru/ = locale ru-rus etc.

 

I know that the goal is to have all three of these line up (navigation = canonical = sitemap) but until we are able to do that, are we causing damage to our listings?  Does Google ignore the sitemap and only index the pages it finds through the navigation links etc.?  I have full control over the sitemap so I can create it to match whatever is best.  I'm just not sure what is best at this point.

 

Thanks for any advise.

[Jill]

For the most part, as long as you're using the canonical link element (rel=canonical) then the rest shouldn't matter. 

 

That said, it's my opinion that it's still best to link as much as possible (internally and externally) to the actual URL you're using as the canonical. If there are zero internal links pointing to the actual canonical URL it just seems to me that it could cause problems. (I ran into a site I was reviewing once with that problem. Impossible to say whether that fact was contributing to some of their traffic loss or not, unfortunately.)