I am new in web development / SEO and stucked so hard on next moment:
- We got sitemap file for helping SE robots index our pages correctly.
- Sitemap could contain only URLs from current sitemap directory. For example: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml can contain only links, whose exist in same catalog. But how data transfer protocols (http/https) relate to my finite directory, if it is just a way for transfer data? I have not two different folders with sources on my web server for http and https, lol. And indexing should not changing with protocol changes in URL. Same question i got for www subdomen. I know what a problem in my missunderstanding in web basics xD
CodePudding user response：
Clients (such as search engine indexing bots and browsers) make HTTP requests to servers, which provide a response.
A URL is how a specific resource is located. It will specify the scheme/protocol, hostname, and path (and optionally a few other things).
A URL might specify HTTP or HTTPS (the latter adding an encryption layer).
The hostname portion of a URL might include www in the name or it might not.
When the server receives the request it will run some code to determine how to respond to it. A common and simple approach for that code is to match the path portion of the URL to part of the directory structure of the file system of the computer running the HTTP server software. It may, or may not, use different directories as the root for this depending on the hostname and protocol.
This means that you might have an HTTP server providing both HTTP and HTTPS and mapping www.example.com and example.com onto the same directory resulting in (at least) four different URLs all mapping onto any given file.
Best practise is to pick one of those as the canonical URL (with preference given to HTTPS and various arguments for with or without the www (which mostly revolve around convenience and how cookies for the primary hostname will be handled on other subdomains).
When writing absolute URLs, use the canonical URL.
It is generally recommended that the server be configured to issue 301 Redirects from the non-canonical URLs to the canonical equivalent.