: Dealing with usernames in the URL This is my first question on here so let me know if I have not followed any rules. I run a website Audibase that has the usernames in the URLs for example:

@Ann8826881

What is the best practise to apply SEO for these to show up in the search engine for their username?


You would need to include the username as part of the page title element. Also link to these pages using the username as the anchor text. Including the username (naturally) in the page content will also help. LinkedIn includes the user's name as the first text in the page title.


Do I add all the usernames to my sitemap.xml will this help them rank the problem is I have hundreds and which one take priority?


You can include all the URLs in your XML sitemap, however, the XML sitemap does not help with ranking. The XML sitemap simply helps (hard to find / poorly linked) pages to be found by the search engines in the first place.

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@Gloria169

To make it scalable, you should use multiple sitemaps. In Google Webmaster tools, you can specify multiple sitemaps, which means that you can create one that is specific to user profiles.

Bearing that in mind, you should stick to following requirements:


A sitemap file can't contain more than 50,000 URLs and must be no
larger than 50 MB uncompressed.


The requirements are listed here. Google recommends that you split larger sitemaps up into smaller ones.

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