XML sitemaps are an important part of your site because they ensure search engines can crawl all the pages on your site that you want to appear in the search results. It’s up to you to decide what pages you want to include, and what pages are better left unincluded. Keep an eye out for thin content pages, for example, as these can harm your rankings.
Yoast SEO allows you a lot of control over what will and what won’t appear in your XML sitemap and the search results. With good reason: many sites have pages that add little value, and are better off not being crawled. But how do you determine if including a page in an XML sitemap is beneficial? Let’s go into that with this week’s question!
Marek emailed us his question on this subject:
Is it beneficial for SEO to include WooCommerce product tags in an XML sitemap? They are currently added by default by Yoast SEO.
Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!
Including WooCommerce product tags in your XML sitemap
“Whether or not it’s beneficial depends. If your product tags are a good entry point for Google to find more of your products on your site, then yes it’s beneficial. If your product tags are lousy pages that add no value, then no, it is not beneficial. So you should make a decision about that yourself. Good luck!”
Ask Yoast
In the series Ask Yoast, we answer SEO questions from our readers. Have an SEO-related question? Maybe we can help you out! Send an email to [email protected].
Note: please check our blog and knowledge base first, the answer to your question may already be out there! For urgent questions, for example about our plugin not working properly, we’d like to refer you to our support page.
Read more: ‘What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one?’ »