Multiple Sitemaps
-
Hello everyone!
I am in the process of updating the sitemap of an ecommerce website and I was thinking to upload three different sitemaps for different part (general/categories and subcategories/productgroups and products) of the site in order to keep them easy to update in the future.
Am I allowed to do so? would that be a good idea?
Open to suggestion
-
Right! I think now I have the complete picture and I can crack on working on it!
Thank you very much indeed!
Best Regards
Oscar
-
If you are talking about the sitemap for the visitors on your website, if you think the newly added pages are going to be helpful to them, you can update your visitors sitemap accordingly. But the Sitemap.xml file is a supplemental indexing tool meant for the search engines to find the pages on your website easily and needs to be updated and resubmitted to search engines using webmaster tools accounts whenever new pages are added to your website.
Hope that helps.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thanks a lot guys!
I really appreciated your help, although all this information made me realize I have tons of work to do to update the sitemaps and I have to start creating new ones.
Just another question, after I create the new sitemaps I will also have to update the sitemap on the website, is that right?
-
it should be added to the end of your robots.txt and be proceeded by 'Sitemap', like:
Sitemap: http://www.exmaple.com/sitemap1.xml
Sitemap: http://www.exmaple.com/sitemap2.xml -
No problem my friend. You are most welcome. Yes, you just need to give the location of your sitemap.xml file as given below:
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en
-
Oh I see, thank you very much for your help, I haven't got much experience dealing with sitemaps.
So in order to put them in the robots.txt I will just have to put the link in it without anything else, is that right?
-
Hi there, robots.txt file is one of the initial things that search engine spiders look at when they visit your website and a reference to the Sitemap.xml file in there will aid the search engine spider to quickly access to important URLs on your website then and there.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Why should I put the sitemaps in the robots.txt?
I ve been looking around and some sites do and some don't, what's the reason for it?
-
Thanks for the response my friend. The problem without an index sitemap file is, when you have to resubmit multiple sitemap.xml files in webmaster tools account, you will have to resubmit each of them at a time. With an index sitemap file, you just need to submit the index file and it would take care of the job.
Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/71453?hl=en
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
You don't actually need to use a sitemap index file to use multiple sitemaps. You can list and submit them separately in robots.txt file and Google Web Master Tools.
-
Yes this is fine, from Google:
Whether you list all URLs in a single Sitemap or in multiple Sitemaps (in the same directory of different directories) is simply based on what's easiest for you to maintain. We treat the URLs equally for each of these methods of organization. More info can be found here multiple sitemaps in same directory
-
Hi there, though a single Sitemap.xml file can accommodate upto 50K URLs, it is not uncommon to go for multiple Sitemap.xml files for many purposes even with few hundreds on each.
You need to come up with a total of 4 Sitemap files and one among these would be an index sitemap that lists the other 3 Sitemap.xml files with URLs.
Here you go for more: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
Best,
Devanur Rafi
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Protecting sitemaps - Good idea or humbug?
Is there a way to protect your sitemap.xml so that only Google can read it and would it make sense to do this?
Technical SEO | | Roverandom0 -
What are the negative implications of listing URLs in a sitemap that are then blocked in the robots.txt?
In running a crawl of a client's site I can see several URLs listed in the sitemap that are then blocked in the robots.txt file. Other than perhaps using up crawl budget, are there any other negative implications?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
Event Schema markup for multiple events (same location/address)?
I was wondering if its possible to markup multiple events on the same page for one location/address using the event schema.org markup? I tried doing it on a sample page below: http://www.rama.id.au/event-schema-test/ Google's schema testing tool shows that its all good (except for warning for offers). Just wanted to know if I am doing it correctly or is there a better solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | Vsood0 -
Generating a xml sitemap?
Hi What is everyone's preferred method of generating an XML sitemap? Just wondering if one piece of software is better than others?
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency1 -
Sitemap & noindex inconstancy?
Hey Moz Community! On a the CMS in question the sitemap and robots file is locked down. Can't be edited or modified what so ever. If I noindex a page in the But it is still on the xml sitemap... Will it get indexed? Thoughts, comments and experience greatly appreciate and welcome.
Technical SEO | | paul-bold0 -
Does Google Still Pass Anchor Text for Multiple Links to the Same Page When Using a Hashtag? What About Indexation?
Both of these seem a little counter-intuitive to me so I want to make sure I'm on the same page. I'm wondering if I need to add "#s to my internal links when the page I'm linking to is already: a.) in the site's navigation b.) in the sidebar More specifically, in your experience...do the search engines only give credit to (or mostly give credit to) the anchor text used in the navigation and ignore the anchor text used in the body of the article? I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed. Just so I understand this... a.) if I were use a hashtag at the end of a link as the first link in the body of a page, this means that the rest of the article won't be indexed? b.) if I use a table of contents at the top of a page and link to places within the document, then only the areas of the page up to the table of contents will be indexed/crawled? Thanks ahead of time! I really appreciate the help.
Technical SEO | | Spencer_LuminInteractive0 -
Multiple (different) domains and canonicalisation
Hello, We've had experience with canonical tags for various domains before, such as tidying up product categories etc... However, can anyone point me to any guidelines about different domains using canonicalisation. For example: If I had the following sites, all with identical content - exampledomain.com completelydifferentdomain.net anothertotallydifferentdomain.com With canonical tags pointing to the first one (exampledomain.com), could this be harmful? Is it better to 301 redirect the other sites? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sarbs0 -
Best practices for migrating an html sitemap? Or just get rid of it all together?
We are migrating a very large site to a new CMS and I'm trying to determine the best way to handle all the links (~15k) in our html sitemap. The developers don't see the purpose of using an html sitemap anymore and I have yet to come up with a good reason why we should migrate rather than just get rid of the sitemap since it is not very useful to users. The html sitemap was created about 6 years ago when page rank sculpting was a high priority. Currently, since we already have an XML sitemap, I'm not sure that there's really a need for a html sitemap, other than to maintain all the internal links. How valuable are the internal links found in an html sitemap? And will it be a problem if we remove these from our link profile? 15,000 links sounds significant, but they only account for less than .5% of our internal links. What do all you think?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0