Recently launched a new Webflow site and am hosting on Webflow. Interestingly, the homepage hasn’t indexed yet but the one interior page has. I’ve occasionally had this happen even with a Wordpress site and it’s a pain to get sorted and sometimes impossible with Google (doesn’t often happen in Bing).
SEO is of course important but ever changing and so I started looking into some more things. Here is what I know or at least, think I know.
Looking at the sitemap generated their aren’t priorities assigned to pages, frequency or dates. The other thing I notice is that the trailing forward slash isn’t used with the homepage url and I’m pretty sure it should be. @cyberdave Should it be?
When a Webflow site is published, all pages are published and updated with an HTML time stamp. – Last Published: Thu Aug 06 2015 14:00:57 GMT+0000 (UTC) . According to a few sources I’ve found this isn’t really good for SEO. This is an older article but I think still relevant Is "last modified" time in XML Sitemaps important? | SEO Forum | Moz. If not could someone correct me. Wordpress attaches publish dates to pages and articles at least when using Yoast.
With that in mind would it be better for Webflow not to generate the date in HTML and let users add published dates to the sitemap using the sitemap protocol sitemaps.org - Protocol ? Or could we get page by page publish control.
I’m not an SEO expert but have had decent luck with getting pages to rank. I do have one novice question…what does the .9 mean in urlset xmlns=“www.sitemaps.org - /schemas/sitemap/0.9/”>?
Hi @jdesign, just a couple of things. Webflow allows you to paste your own sitemap into to the sitemap field in the SEO tab.
A good place to generate a sitemap is https://www.xml-sitemaps.com. There you can generate different options that should go in your sitemap.
Next go to your site settings page and click on the SEO tab. There you can paste the sitemap.xml field and generate a sitemap for your site.
After generating a sitemap, you can then go to Google Webmaster Tools and submit your site map using your domain name, such as: www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.
Webflow does not generate any sitemap priorities, frequency or dates, you have to do that manually. Regarding the changes to the way the timestamp works, you can create a wishlist item how you want this to work http://forum.webflow.com/category/feedback/wish-list
The .9 means that is the version of the xml sitemap schema that is being used.
I hope this helps. If not, please let me know – I’m happy to assist further!
@cyberdave Thanks for the response, it’s a good reference.
I had already added my own sitemap via a generator and submitted to Google. But it did add the trailing forward slash and I just wanted to make sure that it’s okay to use the forward slash or should it be left off based on how Webflow files things.
I did test both versions via Google and didn’t get any error but I’m not sure I would…thinking the problem would actually be in search rank results.
I’ll add removing the HTML timestamp to the wish-list. Maybe others can weigh in but I think having that timestamp the same on all pages isn’t the best plan and contradicting the timestamp with a last published date via the sitemap might be worse. However, if someone knows different I’d love to hear.
FYI, the “last published” timestamp that we write to the HTML has no affect on the way google indexes your site. It’s in an HTML comment block, which is not something Google crawlers will parse.
