Anchor Links in /sitemap.xml

  • Resolved richgraphix

    (@richgraphix)


    4 years, 10 months ago

    Hello,
    We noticed that the sitemap generated by WP Meta SEO includes anchor links (i.e. https://toufayan.com/products/#buns).

    As far as I understand it, this is indexing the same page (toufayan.com/products) over and over again – which sounds bad. The HTML version of the sitemap doesn’t have the anchor links, but its the xml version that gets submitted to Google, right?

    If we manually edit the xml version, we’d have to do that every time a page or post is created, defeating the purpose of the generated sitemap altogether.

    Please advise on this and/or let us know how to prevent the anchor links from getting added to the sitemap. We’re hoping to avoid removing the links and restructuring the site to accommodate the index as the page is popular plus the task would be quite large.

    Thank you.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author JoomUnited

    (@joomunited)

    4 years, 9 months ago

    Hi,

    Thanks for contacting us about WP Meta SEO sitemap links.
    That wouldn’t hurt your SEO as google index the anchors in page and can return a specific URL with anchor in SERP. Though I would like to understand how does it happens 🙂

    Can you please tell me what is the content type loaded in your sitemap? Is it posts, menus…

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter richgraphix

    (@richgraphix)

    4 years, 9 months ago

    I disagree, by adding these anchors to the sitemap, you are including the same page multiple times – since, Google won’t read the anchor part (#product-name), it sees the first part 33 times. This is certainly bad for seo.

    The content is from a page, and every anchor on every page (see the link in my original post).

    Looking into it further, I see a lot of evidence that implies that anchors on a site map are no good and i find other plugins that generate sitemaps without including anchors.

    Is it possible to add some script to the sitemap generator that just ignores links that include #’s?

    Plugin Author JoomUnited

    (@joomunited)

    4 years, 9 months ago

    Indeed, 33 times that’s a lot but I confirm that search engines does index direct link to anchors. We’ll look into that and I’ll let you know.

    Cheers,

    Plugin Author JoomUnited

    (@joomunited)

    4 years, 9 months ago

    My bad, I replied too fast, we already a fix coming for that, it should be pushed by tomorrow.

    Cheers,

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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