Google Sitemap question

I recently updated my site and after testing the new sitemap file that I generated I am getting duplicate URL issues.

Rick_N wrote: Any idea why I would have two different URLs pointing to the same item?

I have seen this as well but unfortunately do not have an answer.  I have a similar problem with duplicate URLs appearing within one set of sitemaps.  Identical product, two links, like this:

...blue-dress-185p39413.htm

...blue-dress-500p39413.htm

This would indicate two different categories.  Any idea where I can see a list of the categories with their assigned numbers?

Rick, did you leave up your old sitemap?  Or maybe you are going to manually edit as needed, then use your custom one instead?

I'm asking because I need a strategy as well.  The first time I created a sitemap, ProductCart created SiteMap.xml, SiteMap1.xml and SiteMap2.xml.  About 6 weeks later I regenerated the sitemaps and it made four this time, to include SiteMap3.xml.  All but one of the Sitemaps has 10,000 URLs in them.  We do not have this many URLs on our site (probably 6,500 at max, excluding search possibilities).

So we have a ton of duplicated URLs.  Rick you mentioned that there should be no category added when the item's in multiple categories.  I checked this as well under pcSeoLinks.asp at comment:

'Build Canonical URL Link

So why are we getting duplicates in the sitemap?  I guess the sitemap generator isn't using this canonical link when it makes its list?

On a similar topic, I noticed (1) that the <lastmod> references a date that's not actually the creation date/last edited date of the various pages, and (2) the <changefreq> is a blanket one, same for every link.  This is not valid for our pages and another reason to manually create this and/or look for a different generator IMHO.

OK, I found a fix for my problem. The query loads the number of returned rows and uses that in it's count to loop through the results.

How about this as a potential/quick fix...

When you go to generate the sitemap, use the feature that allows you to exclude certain categories:

Categories
Select categories that should be excluded. To improve performance, you can limit the amount of categories included in the map. To select the categories that you would like to exclude from the map generation process, click on any of the categories shown in the Exclude These Categories field. Keep the CTRL key on your keyboard pressed to select multiple categories.

This only works if you have a clean way to include/exclude categories so that you can get one complete list easily.  It also seems less than best *if* the categories you do select aren't showing the canonical version.

Maybe you could do this once, and then strip the categories out with Find/Replace in a text editor?

Edited To Add:
I tried to generate a new sitemap, it said it's successful, but the sitemaps remain unchanged on my server (domain.com/store/SiteMap.xml, SiteMap1.xml, etc).  I have a local copy and bytes are identical.  Hmmm... I think I will submit a support ticket and see what can be learned.


Edited by prillo - 05-February-2012 at 10:43am

The instr idea seems like it would work. 

I was wondering if you had items exclusive to some categories (i.e. excluding Cat B would mean skipping data elsewhere).  Too bad that wouldn't cut it.  I thought it would for me, but as edited above, I am not getting any new sitemaps generated via the wizard.  Strange.