Is there a maximum sitemap size?

[Troteclaser]

Hi all,

Over the last month we've included all images, videos, etc. into our sitemap and now its loading time is rather high. (http://www.troteclaser.com/sitemap.xml)

Is there any maximum sitemap size that is recommended from Google?

[David-Kley]

You can submit them separately. One for video, one for images, one for URL's. This may be a more effective approach at getting things indexed, as it separates them into their own category. If you are already having a high load time, wouldn't hurt to try.

To answer your original question:

"Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. These limits help to ensure that your web server does not get bogged down serving very large files."

But wait, there's more!

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021559.html

"Google has changed the number of Sitemaps you can reference in a Sitemap index file. The number use to be 1,000 sitemaps can be referenced in a Sitemap index file, now the number is 50,000 Sitemaps. This is a huge increase in capacity.

Still, each Sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs, so technically 50,000 multiplied by 50,000 is 2,500,000,000 or 2.5 billion URLs can be submitted to Google via Sitemaps."