Sitemap: unique sitemap or different sitemaps by Country

[thekiller99]

Hi guys,

i have a question about sitemaps. We are doing an international site, e.x. www.offers.com for landing page and www.offers.com/br for brazil, www.offers.com/it for italy, etc... i don't if we should do an unique sitemap for all countries or separate sitemaps by country, e.x.:

unique sitemap:

www.offers.com/sitemap.xml - including all sitemaps

www.offers.com/br/sitemap.xml - sitemap for brazil market only.

Thank you

[ConclusionDigital]

I think Google has documented this pretty clear on the page describing how to Use a sitemap to indicate alternate language pages. NOt only for languages, but also combinations of languages and regions i.e. Switzerland (de-ch), Ireland (en-ie) and so on. The downside on this is that must create a separate url element for each URL.

[danatanseo]

I agree with Logan. If the total number of URLs in your master sitemap is 50,000 or less, you can do one sitemap. If it's more, split it into multiples.

You should mark Logan's answer as a good answer.

Sincerely,

Dana

[LoganRay]

It depends on how many pages you'll have in each of the subsequent country-level sitemaps. If it's only going to be a few pages in each country, then it's probably not worth it. It'll take extra time for you to generate and waste some of your crawl budget. If you have a substantial amount of content in each of the country folders, it could help search engines understand your site structure a little more clearly.

Either way you go isn't going to make or break your SEO campaign.