Duplicate XML sitemaps - 404 or leave alone?
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We switched over from our standard XML sitemap to a sitemap index. Our old sitemap was called sitemap.xml and the new one is sitemapindex.xml.
In Webmaster Tools it still shows the old sitemap.xml as valid. Also when you land on our sitemap.xml it will display the sitemap index, when really the index lives on sitemapindex.xml.
The reason you can see the sitemap on both URLs is because this is set from the sitemap plugin. So the question is, should we change the plugin setting to let the old sitemap.xml 404, or should we allow the new sitemap index to be accessed on both URLs?
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If webmaster tools likes the old one then I wouldn't rock the boat. I don't think you are going to have any problems with having 2 site maps. But I've never toyed with this one.
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It makes no difference.
The only ones who access your XML sitemap are web crawlers. Web crawlers become aware of your sitemap location by three methods:
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you notify the crawler such as in Google WMT
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you notify the crawler with a path provided in your robots.txt file
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you notify the crawler by pinging them with your sitemap information
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if I was to add a 4th method, crawlers can guess /sitemap.xml as a default path
As long as you have the a valid location set up in WMT (both Google and Bing), and you do not offer the alternate file name in your robots.txt or elsewhere, no one else will even know the sitemapindex.xml file exists.
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