At a guess, and it really is a guess, if multiple sitemaps were a problem Google wouldn’t allow you to add them or they would come with a caveat. Logically I think I would prefer to have a single sitemap though.
Are you adding a link to your sitemaps in the robots.text file? If not that would be a good thing to do.
Sort of. I only have the one robots.txt file sitting in the root of my domain, and I link only to the main sitemap.xml file (which is located in that root directory). I do not have a separate robots.txt file in my /en directory, and therefore I do not have a link to that English version sitemap.xml within any robots.txt file.
Repeating my previous question…
Must I resubmit my sitemaps to the Google Console each time I update the sitemaps, or is Google smart enough to keep checking them over time, since the URLs to those sitemaps don’t change?
In your robots.txt file I would add the urls for the locations of both sitemaps. You shouldn’t need to resubmit your sitemaps every time there is a change, because Google should find them anyway, but having said that, there is no harm in doing so and it only takes seconds.
But would the following really be valid for use inside robots.txt? Or would it just take the first line and ignore the second?
Sitemap: https://mysite.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://mysite.com/en/sitemap.xmlAgain I’ve only ever needed to do this for a single sitemap but I don’t see why it should be a problem in theory. Combining them should also solve this. Dare I say it, these questions are not limited to Blocs and might find more qualified specific answers on the Google webmaster groups.
I did exactly the same like this @JDW in the robos.txt and google found my both sitemaps and index them, I have good results if i search on some key words, both in English and in German in my case. just test ist in google search console and submit the 2 sitemaps there
It’s a good question. It would take more of an SEO expert than me to say whether there’s an advantage in doing it one way or the other. Logically and as far as Google is concerned, I would think it makes no difference - whether you submit one sitemap or two, you are notifying Google of all of your urls.
I don’t know whether there are any bots / search engines which specifically look for sitemap.xml at the root of a domain (in the same way that robots.txt works). If so then there’s an advantage to putting one sitemap.xml at the root.
re your later message, I’ve found that Google does check the submitted sitemap again without prompting, but it’ll choose the frequency depending on how frequently it sees your content changing. You can specify the change frequency of each url within your sitemap.xml (Scrutiny gives you control over this) but that’s not an instruction to Google/search engines, only a hint.
As not (at all) being an SEO expert like you all, I don’t even fully understand what’s going on here 
, but I would like to ask if someone knows this:
I would want to have some pages to NOT appear on any search engine, while the website and the majority of the pages of course should rank as high as possible. 
Could I „damage“ the ranking with hiding some pages?
The alternative would be, to put just the content that should not appear on search engines on a totally different Website (different domain).
Is it easier/better/ more reliable to create an extra Website for this content?
It’s not super secret stuff, but I wouldn’t want it to show up in search engines.
Can your app „Scrutiny“ be of help with this?
Thanks in advance 
I don’t think that hiding pages from Google will negatively impact your overall ranking, since there are perfectly legitimate reasons for doing so. It will simply index what is available. I doubt either that you would benefit from having a second domain, but on the other aspects @peahen is best placed to answer regarding Scrutiny.
Thank you for your interest @Ms_Sun.
I don’t think it would make any difference to your SEO whether you hide the pages or put them on a different domain. Someone with more SEO experience will give you better advice than me on that point.
Scrutiny isn’t a magic wand that will make your site better. It can’t help with questions of strategy like this (although the sitemap visualiser can show how ‘link juice’ cascades and may be useful here). But what it will do is scan your site and report problems. You will need some knowledge in order to interpret the results and fix the problems.
It will tell you about many different SEO issues (such as titles / descriptions which are missing / too long / too short, pages with thin content, duplicate content, missing or multiple h1s, images without alt text and much more). Addressing any such things that it reports will definitely help your ranking.
Thank you for the explanations @peahen
Sounds like your „Scrutiny“ is a good tool on top of the SEO feature in Blocs 4 Plus then, when wanting to do more regarding SEO.
btw: always nice to see female developers! 
What about “hiding content on a page” then?
As you know, Blocs let’s you choose the “visibility” in the right sidebar by breakpoint, but you can take it all the way and kill visibility completely across all breakpoints.
For the longest time I had been thinking that killing visibility across all breakpoints would just prevent that content from being written to the HTML page on Export from Blocks (like we used to do in SoftPress Freeway when the “Publish” checkbox was unticked for any given item on the page), but I came to see that Blocs still writes that totally hidden (across all breakpoints) content to the HTML page! So because it is on the page, I would think Google might index it. However, it isn’t visible so I cannot say for sure what the bot will do.
Anyway, the comment about “hiding pages” made me think about this.
Getting back to the topic of “Canonical links”…
I exported from Blocs 4.0.1 today with Page Settings > SEO > Misc > Enable Canonical Meta Tag checkmarked. I see that Blocs is exporting this code:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://kiramek.com/index.html"/>
Previously when I manually added Canonical on top page, I used this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://kiramek.com">
I think my code is better because when you use Canonical, you are basically telling Google what URL you want displayed in the search results. With all the fuss about Clean URLs, you certainly would not want to see “index.html” at the end. So shouldn’t that be fixed in Blocs 4, or is there a valid reason for adding that “/index.html” at the end? @Norm
On the first point I have never seen hidden content appear in a Google search, so I am going to assume Google simply ignores it. After all, what is the point of indexing hidden content that cannot be seen by the visitor?
For the canonical links I am guessing your project setting for the domain includes the /index.html. I am not seeing the same issue as you. Alternatively it might do that if you have not enabled clean urls.
I do not have Clean URLs enabled. But I still think it should forgo the index.html for the top page.
For now, I am forcing Blics to do what I want by disabling the Canonical checkbox on my top page and manually adding the code I write.
If you disable clean url in the settings it would seem correct to include index.html in the home page canonical link. Other pages would then be /about.html etc.
Why would it seem to be correct?
As I stated previously, Canonical tells search engines what URL you want to appear in search results (e.g., with or without /xxx.html at the end). So it matters nothing if you have it at the end or not, except for aesthetics/readability. And that is precisely what Clean URLs are all about from what I have read. Clean is mainly about eye candy. Therefore, by writing my own Canonical code to eliminate the eyesore “/index.html” at the end of my home page, that homepage URL will then look clean even though I am not using Clean URLs in Blocs. And yes, I have my reasons for not enabling Clean URLs at this time.
I should add that I have used the following code for my home page for a very long time – as long as I’ve been using Blocs and even back when I used Freeway. It’s never been a problem at all.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://kiramek.com">
If you want exclude the eyesore of having index.html at the end it would seem logical to simply enable clean urls.
I’m really only concerned about the root level HOME page being clean. The other pages look “normal” to my eye with /xxx.html at the end. Why does “/index.html” not look normal? Because “index” is obvious and therefore not needed. Furthermore, “index” really isn’t a useful word. On my other web pages, I name the page a product number like /1480.html so you know by a glance at the URL what product page you are on. Clean URLs takes that a step further an obliterates the “.html” part, but I don’t see that as being so necessary.
Using Clean URLs also changes the folder structure of the site. I have a lot of hand-written URL links scattered around my web pages in Blocs, and I honestly don’t want to individually hunt those links down and re-write them for the sake of any perceived benefits Clean URLs gives to me.
As far as I am aware nobody else is having issues with canonical links or Clean URLs. If you feel this is wrong submit it as a bug for review. Personally I feel Clean URLs are more professional looking and less likely to generate problems.
@JDW
Apart from you having already built the folder structure:
would you chose Clean URLs for a NEW project or rather not?
If not: why?