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Adding tag pages and archives in the .xml Sitemap?

by Craigcmatthew
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Sorry, I googled but could not find a conclusive answer to this.

All the posts on my blog have some tags associated with them. So far I've excluded them from my sitemap as I fear Google will flag them as duplicate content. I wonder if that's a good idea?

Including tags and archives in the sitemap will mean that Google will index more pages and hopefully more traffic!

So, my question is simple, do you include tag pages and archives in the .xml sitemap?

NB: Mine's a WP blog like all others.
#adding #archives #pages #sitemap #tag #xml
  • Profile picture of the author time4vps
    You should only include pages in your sitemap, which also are indexed. So then the question becomes, should you index tags or categories/archives. I firmly believe, so long as the site is set up correctly, you should not index tags but it's OK to index categories/archives.
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  • Profile picture of the author silverm
    Adding categories/tag/archives pages to your sitemap will not get you more traffic, atleast nothing significant. Google can detect those pages and it avoids showing those pages in serps.

    It should be sufficient to add the posts/pages to your sitemap. I do that only
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  • Profile picture of the author webdevpro
    For my wordpress sites I do not include tags/categories in sitemaps at it creates thousands of post with almost similar results and may result in confusing the search engines about which page to show up in SERP.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
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    Originally Posted by Craigcmatthew View Post

    Sorry, I googled but could not find a conclusive answer to this.

    All the posts on my blog have some tags associated with them. So far I've excluded them from my sitemap as I fear Google will flag them as duplicate content. I wonder if that's a good idea?

    Including tags and archives in the sitemap will mean that Google will index more pages and hopefully more traffic!

    So, my question is simple, do you include tag pages and archives in the .xml sitemap?

    NB: Mine's a WP blog like all others.

    Yes WP Tags are duplicate pages.

    My advice is delete Tags & don't use them. If you really think you need Tags for whatever reason make sure you have a canonical HTML tag on the Tag pages pointing back to the original webpage URL. That tells Google you know the Tag page is a duplicate webpage & you're not trying to game Google SERPs.
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  • Profile picture of the author Craigcmatthew
    Thanks for the advice. I was really confused about this. I'm not adding tags/archives to the sitemap then.
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  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    I've been explicitly adding category pages to sitemaps on some sites because they're a part of the site structure. Those pages have content that's unique to them, and are potentially more important than an individual product page under them. But can't remember the last time I found any good use for the tag archives.

    Taking something out of your XML sitemap has no bearing on Google "flagging" it as duplicate. If they can crawl it, they will probably do something with it.
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