I recently encountered an issue where a client with a web server cluster was having difficulty keeping every node’s copy of their sitemap up-to-date, and wanted to know if all the search engines’ sitemap bots would follow a 301 redirect on the sitemap itself to a master server with a different domain than the site for which the sitemap is authored.

I doubted that we could trust that redirects on sitemaps would necessarily be followed by every service which supports them. I asked Google’s Matt Cutts about it, and he offered the following suggestions:

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Properly translating your search-unfriendly URL’s into search-lovable ones, or just scrambling up your information architecture (or “IA”, which is essentially a site’s navigational structure, with respect to the way content is organized) into something more delicious to bots and humans alike should be a straightforward process. Many of us had to learn this process from trial-and-error (trial by fire more like it) or, if you were lucky, from popular SEO folklore.

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