Which is best structure for Multiple XML Sitemap?

[CommercePundit]

I have read such a great blog posts on Multiple XML Sitemaps on following websites before a week.

• SEOmoz
• Distilled
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Inc

I have created multiple XML sitemaps for my eCommerce website with following structure and submitted to Google webmaster tools.

http://www.vistastores.com/main_sitemap.xml

http://www.vistastores.com/products_sitemap.xml

But, I am not satisfy with my second XML sitemap because it contain more than 7K+ product page URLs and looks like very slow crawling by Google!

I want to separate my XML sitemap with following structure.

With Root Level Category

http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor_sitemap.xml

http://www.vistastores.com/furniture_sitemap.xml

http://www.vistastores.com/kitchen_dining_sitemap.xml

http://www.vistastores.com/home_decor_sitemap.xml

OR::: End Level Category

http://www.vistastores.com/table_lamps_sitemap.xml

http://www.vistastores.com/floor_lamps_sitemap.xml

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. etc....

So, Which is best structure for Multiple XML Sitemap?

[CommercePundit]

I have developed multiple XML site maps for my eCommerce website (Lamps Lighting and More) and submitted to Google webmaster tools. You can see attached image to know more about it.

I measured that, Google is not crawling effectively after it. Please, check image and let me know regarding issue.

6194756364_fb82efbbca_b.jpg

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I think you already gave the answer yourself. That would be a great strategy in my opinion. Then you also will directly see what is working on your product page (for Google) and what is not. So you are able to optimize even better for the rest of your product(page)s.

Happy optimizing!

[CommercePundit]

I am thinking on same way. If I will create individual XML sitemap for my Table Lamps category so help me more to focus more on specific category.

If any category will not index by Google so I can focus more on quality of product pages.

What you think about it?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Great question, we had the same question a year ago when we started to work with sitemaps for our products. I cannot give you the answer which is the best, but I would recommend for now the end level category for your sitemap structure.

This will give you more useful insights in the crawling and indexation of your product urls, filtered at an end level category level. So that you can see for example that you're table lamps are better indexed than the floor lamps, which will make your data more actionable then at the root level category level. So you could for example, move your linkbuilding activities to another end level category.

By choosing the root level category it looks like to me you only separate the amount of urls you submit to Google and you still have to dig even harder to find the information you need or would like to see. That is also why you probably created the categories, to make searching for your users more usable instead of giving them an overview of 7000 courses.

You also thought about using a sitemap index file? This could be useful to keep track of all your sitemaps and makes submitting your sitemaps, in this case, a lot easier.

But I definitely would like to read more comments!