: 301 redirect for pages not in sitemap I am thinking of creating 301 redirects for pages that are updated versions of existing pages, on the same site. The old and new pages will have very

@Karen161

You're probably right that search engines could have trouble identifying the right pages if the sitemap can't be edited, so only the old URLs will be listed there, not the new ones.

If you can add new pages & create redirects, then this might be your best solution:


Create your new pages
Redirect (301) to them from the old URLs
Create a new sitemap with the correct/new URLs listed
Redirect (301) to the new sitemap from the old sitemap URL
Submit the new sitemap URL to Webmaster Tools


This way search engines won't be constantly told to crawl old URLs.

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@Annie201

You're thinking right.

Use 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages. I'd recommend advertising only the new URLs in your sitemap that point to actual webpages with content people can see. It is not necessary to advertise the old URLs since Google automatically follows redirects.

Eventually, Google will only index the new URLs and remove the old URLs from the index since a redirect does not count as a real webpage.

The less redirects that a web browser is required to process to get to a webpage, the better.

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