SiteMap Questions

[TravG]

For those who run a blog or have a "news" section on your website, do you include categories and archive pagess in your site map? The plugin to generate the sitemap I use has it set not to include these by default. Wondering what everyone thinks as to if these should be included or not.

Thanks

[technog33k]

I would not include them in the sitemap file. If the original URL of content is within the sitemap file that is all you need. Depending on the size of your site category, archives and tag pages can introduce a lot of duplicate content which can cause real problems. Categories, archives and tags are great for user navigation but there is no real need for them within the sitemap file or even within Google's index (there are some exceptions but for a wordpress based sites this is a basic rule).. If you are using Wordpress SEO or similar plugins they normally have this turned off by default and have done for the past year or so. There is no real need to have these pages indexed and for clients of mine (I run a SEO firm in Australia) as well as my own sites I generally noindex the categories, archive, tags etc etc..

[TravG]

Thanks for the input. That is what I kind of fiqured.