How 308 Redirects Helped Me Contain a Sitemap Mess

I recently rolled out a sitemap update with around 3,000 new pages using the /en/blog/... structure.

But Yandex Webmaster decided to ignore the /en prefix entirely and tried to crawl /blog/... instead. That created the risk of thousands of crawl errors.

The lifesaver: Luckily, I already had proactive 308 redirects in place. So instead of running into a wall of 404s, the bots were seamlessly sent to the correct URLs.

Key takeaways:

1. ✅ Never assume search engines will parse your sitemap.xml perfectly.
2. ✅ Set up redirects before you need them. They are your safety net against traffic loss and indexing problems.