Duplicate Content URLs In Sitemap File Won’t Impact Rankings
Google’s John Mueller affirmed on Twitter that if a Sitemap file has a list of pages duplicative to others, it won’t likely drive ranking issues for your site. It might complicate Google while crawling but should not affect rankings.
John was questioned, “how quickly could a sitemap that accidentally allows for duplicate content across an entire site cause issues in your rankings?”
As per John, “I don’t think it would cause ranking problems.” He further clarified that it might confuse with “crawling as an early effect” but added, “I don’t see how this would cause immediate ranking changes for the whole site.”
Below are those tweets:
Key Takeaway:
Duplicate URLs in sitemap files might be inadequate and lead to crawling confusion but it should not influence the Google Search rankings.
