I just submitted my first sitemap to Webmaster Tools a few days ago. Now I just added some new pages to my site and I'm not sure that I should create a new sitemap or just extend the existing.   So which option is the right?   Adding the new URLs to my existing sitemap (sitemap1.xml) and doesn't change anything. Creating a new sitemap called sitemap2.xml and submitting it as well to Webmaster Tools.    Or maybe it doesn't really matter and I can choose the option I like? Is there any SEO related danger if I delete the old sitemap and submit the new one (with a new name and URL)?
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In short:  Should I resubmit my sitemap through Google Webmasters Tools every time I replace a sitemap.xml with an existing sitemap.xml (i.e., www.domain.com/sitemap.xml)? Or does it check it automatically?  Detail explanation:  Once a week, I add  new articles to my website, and each time after uploading new content, I am replacing my existing sitemap.xml with a newly generated sitemap.xml in my website folder.  So, do you think I need to do the same changes (i.e., again submitting the sitemap.xml) to search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, etc...) and in Google Webmaster Tools also?  Yandex Webmaster Tools says this regarding sitemaps:     Please note: there is no need to delete or add another Sitemap file if it has been modified as the Yandex indexing robot regularly checks for changes.
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What's the right course of action for cross-site duplicates?  There are two flavors:   A question is posted which belongs on another site and ends up already having been asked there. I can't find an example right now, but it's bound to happen soon if it hasn't already. The same question is posted in two places at the same time. Take  for example, which is a duplicate of , posted within a half hour of each other by the same user.   Possible actions:   Move it to the proper site and close it once it gets there as a duplicate. Provide a way to close it right away as a cross-site duplicate, without moving it first. Flag it and let a moderator merge them. Close it as "no longer relevant" or something else.   Additionally, flavor 2 is a bit of a special case; perhaps the question really spans both sites in terms of content and intended audience. Should multiple-postings in this case be allowed? If so, should they somehow be linked to each other? If not, how do we avoid a migration war?
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Just out of curiosity, I have developed a small app analysing and generating sitemaps for a given domain.   Can I tell search engines to look for the sitemap of a given domain on my app using a dynamic url i.e. can you use cross-domain sitemaps.xml without validating you are owner of the destination domain?  For example :   http://example.com/mydomain.com/sitemap.xml
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My website is javatechig.com and is around 6 months old. I have used All-in-One SEO WordPress plugin for SEO tricks. Definitely after using SEO plugin, my website page view is increased, but still it is not giving one good site-link in Google Search.   I have followed the following steps:   Created sitemap.xml and submitted to Google Webmaster Tools Edited all posts with meta tags Header tags are carefully taken care   I want to make a sitelink similar to the attached image:
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I have more than 5 subdomains on a project, say developer, www, staff and some more, what is the best practice in creating sitemaps?   All subdomains that share a same sitemap at base domain (example.com/sitemap.xml) ? or different sitemaps for different subdomains?(developer.example.com/sitemap.xml and www.example.com/sitemap.xml)   Since the subdomains are several parts of the main application, what are the pros and cons of each, and what should I consider while choosing the one over the other? (one sitemap per subdomain or one for the whole site)
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I recently switched my domain from  to , and added my new domain to my Webmaster Tools account. After a few days, I went there and checked the data, and I was a bit worried when I saw this:    How can I interpret this? Is Google really not indexing my site at all? I'm afraid that's the case, because when I google for it, only my old blogspot domain shows up!
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I wanted to switch to  in the handy dandy site switcher in the new top bar. Entering "cook" brings up nothing:     ... so I have to remember that the boutique title of the site is "Seasoned Advice":     ... in which case the site switcher also thinks that maybe I was thinking of heading over to  to see what's up. So the site switcher searches site names and descriptions, but not subdomains. This is unexpected behavior - I believe it should search all three.
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I'm working for a website to convert the website URL to an SEO friendly URL. I plan to use this:  example.com/category-name/pageid-123-page-name  I looked at some similarly categorized, highly ranked websites. They have the same structure, except for one thing. In one case, the URL format was  example.com/category-name/pageid-123-page-name.html  Another was   example.com/category-name/pageid-123-page-name.php  Now I know the text in URLs help with SEO. Is it more helpful to have a file extension? If yes, which one is better?  Or if my current plan is okay, will it be better with a / at the end?
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I had a major issue in the last week where a site was found to be showing huge numbers of pages that it shouldn't have been. Naturally Google indexed all of these pages!   Rather than manually remove 5000+ links, I thought the nuclear option of removing the whole site would be the best option (using the Remove URL tool with no URL provided), since the site was poorly ranking anyway.   I had read that this was a good way to reset your site if you wanted to start over.  I removed the site, then after confirming that Google had removed it, I resubmitted the site for indexing and submitted a new sitemap and a new robots.txt to prevent indexing of the restricted pages.  The sitemap shows that it is indexed (or at least, a large portion of it is indexed) and I can see the Googlebot activity on the site.  However, on my dashboard I see severe health problems listed, with the main one being important page removed and a link to the removal request for the main site.  Furthermore, there are no links to the site in the Google index (when tested against site:example.com in a search).  Do I need to reinclude the site using the removal tool? If I do this, will it re-add all the bad URLs that I was trying to get rid of?
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I want to replace all my website files for new ones on the server and to test if they work alright but I don't want to be crawled while this is happening or if I am,  I don't want the crawler to be able to see what's in the new page.  I just want to change it for like 15min but i tested other stuff once for 5min and google for webmasters told me they had a lot of 404's during that period and I don't want that to happen again.   Besides that I don't want to have to write my whole .htaccess file. I considered redirecting all the urls to my main page and apply the changes but I think this isn't probably a good practice, any good ideas?
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The Yoast SEO plugin for wordpress creates an XML sitemap with the file name sitemap_index.xml. There is another sitemap plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) in the Wordpress site I'm working on that creates a sitemap named sitemap.xml.   Unfortunately I don't know too much about SEO stuff. The top result in Google when searching for the answer to my question is this StackOverflow post that seems to say that it DOES matter for search engines other than Google: . It says to use sitemap.xml. But I'm doubtful of the accuracy of this claim. Also, the sitemap that YoastSEO generates is preferable for my client but it doesn't look like there is a way to configure the name of the sitemap file.  So I thought I would ask the experts here to get a definitive answer. Does it matter that the YoastSEO plugin generates a sitemap with a seemingly non-standard filename?
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I am reviving/reorganising my personal WordPress blog.  It's using a URL that looks like this:  http://mydomain.com/blog  The webserver 301 redirects www.mydomain.com to mydomain.com.  I want to use the blog subdirectory because I plan to add other parts to the site, with the blog only being one part of the site.  However, at the moment there is nothing there but the blog, so I want to have the root index page redirect to the blog for the time being.  I have been using this on the root index.html page to do the redirect...  &lt;meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=./blog"&gt;  ...but this seemed to have stopped the site being indexed by Google and Bing.  How do I do this without affecting SEO?  Also, what URL should I put in the sitemap.xml?
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I have done major updates to my website, and renamed all my URLs.  How can I tell Google that I have renamed these URLs and let Google refresh its index?  My website URL: http://www.pndmasr.com/  My sitemap: http://www.pndmasr.com/sitemap.xml  I have uploaded my sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools many times.  However, every time I search Google for "pndmasr", I still get results with old pages. I have waited more than 3 days but the problem remains. Any suggestions?  Is there a problem with my sitemap?
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Let's have some fun shall we??  At the bottom of the content for about 1/3rd of my pages, but not in the footer, I create an internal link for each related IP address to the page on my site for that IP address. This was fine 6 months ago, but now that my database has grown so large, I discovered that it was not uncommon to create 700+ links within this section with one page having 2600. Ooopppsss!! ;-) Houston, we have a problem!  Now this is easy enough to fix. For right now, I put a limit 100 on the query. But this got me thinking and searching for a definitive answer. So far... no luck.  Please understand I do fully know the effects regarding SEO. Most of you know that already. I am not looking for a lesson- just an idea of a range.  Q: How many internal links per page is too many?  There are a lot of answers on the net culled from various nether regions and I have a number in mind (also culled), but I was thinking that there has to be an authoritative answer somewhere. Google says reasonable and MOZ's answer seemed to very arbitrary to me. Some so-called SEO experts say as little as 6 and as much as 200. Yeah. That is useful! One said there is no limit. I know there is a semi-flexible practical limit. I remember reading about this years ago, but cannot remember the mechanics behind it right now. I would have to think on this for a while.  Bonus Q: If given a choice of creating links from a random query (and yes I can do this) or first 100 or so (using limit), which would you prefer/advise and why? Again, I have an idea in mind (again, culled). Is there anything definitive in this regard as well?  My primary concerns are UX, download speed, and lastly, Giigle. (&lt;= please do not edit to change)
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I have set up my site with sample pages and data (lorem ipsum, etc..) and Google has crawled these pages. I deleted all these pages and actually added real content but in webmaster tools, i still get a lot of 404 errors Google trying to crawl these pages. I have set them to "mark as resolved" but some pages still come back as 404.   Furthermore, I have a lot of these sample pages still listed when i do a search of my site on Google. How to remove them. I think these irrelevant pages are hurting my rating.   I actually wanted to erase all these pages and start getting my site being being indexed as a new one but I read it's not possible? (I have submitted a sitemap and used "Fetch as Google.")
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Is it possible to redirect a blogspot site to an existing URL?  Note that I don't want to buy a new domain and tell blogspot to use that, eg as per this question: .    Instead I am trying to 301 redirect to an existing website in order to combine the website and the blog in one place.  So it needs to be:  301 example.blogspot.com/post to example.com/blog/post
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I have a friend that I'm helping out with some web design. Basically, the guy owns a few businesses that are all complementary of each other and he wants to combine them all into a single site. There's service A and B, based on the west side of our state; and service A and B based on the east side. Each has their own website (eg, eastservicea.com, westservicea.com).  The previous web designer maintained completely separate and unique content, and unique designs, for all four sites. He is now wanting to merge all that together into a single site (statewideservica.com) with a new design.  Right now all four sites are at the top of the searches for his niche market. The last thing we want to do is hurt that SEO. So the debate how do we merge these sites without hurting the SEO.   Keep the existing URL's and just make the content of all the same. Redirect all the sites to the new URL. Set a static page on all the existing URLs with content, but all links point to the new URL.   Any thoughts?