What should my main sitemap URL be?

[McTaggart]

Hi Mozzers - regarding the URL of a website's main website:

http://example.com/sitemap.xml is the normal way of doing it but would it matter if I varied this to:

http://example.com/mainsitemapxml.xml or similar?

I can't imagine it would matter but I have never moved away from the former before - and one of my clients doesn't want to format the URL in that way.

What the client is doing is actually quite interesting - they have the main sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml - that redirects to the sitemap file which is http://example.com/sitemap (with no xml extension) - might that redirect and missing xml extension the redirected to sitemap cause an issue? Never come across such a setup before.

Thanks in advance for your feedback - Luke

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Yes there is no problem with that, in fact redirect to a list of sitemaps, you can make the test

[McTaggart]

Thanks for your help Ramon!

[McTaggart]

Thanks Roman - that is helpful - with Yoast - do they redirect from one sitemap to another sitemap? Is that acceptable to Google (the redirect from one sitemap URL to another sitemap URL?).

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Is not so weird, Yoast SEO generate multiples sitemaps based on pages, categories or even images and use the same structure, redirect from sitemap.xml to another url

Talking about the format
The Sitemap protocol enables you to provide details about your pages to search engines However, in addition to the XML protocol, there's anothers format supported such as RSS feeds and text files, which provide more limited information.

So there are many option to create a sitemap but the most common and accepted is XML

Source > Sitemap.org

[Moreleads]

hi  Luke Rowlands,

You can use another name (although i can´t come up with a reason why a client wouldn´t want that format in the url).  You should however than

Link to it in your robots.txt or submit the sitemap directly to the search engines