Can Multiple Sitemaps Serve The Same Website?
A sitemap is a good tool to have, especially if you have a new website or your pages are not linked together very well. All the major search engines support sitemaps and having one (or more) on your site does not hurt it in any way.
Yes, I said more. You can have several sitemaps on one site, though most websites only need one. According to Google’s Sitemap Guidelines, a sitemap shouldn’t have more than 50,000 URLs listed. If you have more unique URLs than that then you should have more than one sitemap.
The best way to organizing your sitemaps is to create one for each section of your website and creating a master sitemap to list your sitemaps.
Another reason you might have multiple sitemaps is to serve special purposes. For instance, Google supports video sitemaps. If you have videos on your website then you might want to create a video sitemap. Other special sitemaps include:
These sitemaps serve Google and each has its own unique purpose. For more information on sitemaps visit sitemaps.org.
7 Responses to “Can Multiple Sitemaps Serve The Same Website?”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
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i think its a good idea to have multiple site maps; recently i came through on more point about site maps, that we can add the site map url in robot.txt to let the crawler know about them..
@Punam – Very good point, thanks for reading!
I have experimented with different sitemaps in a website. I had keyword specific folders with web pages inside, all for different Internet marketing strategies. Each one had its own sitemap, and it did fairly well. It did not hurt ranking either.
So I would say yes to having multiple sitmaps in a site that covers multiple areas.
@Matthew Jancosek – Thanks for checking in and your comment regarding sitemaps…
I want multiple sitemaps just for organisation sake. Will that hurt my site in any way? I want 3 – main sitesections, then 2 others which list less important content (20,000 database created pages).
My main reason is that I want to know that my main pages are 100% indexed.
Is this ok? Or should i be checking my main pages another way?
thanks
@Bristol Design – This makes sense to me. I would recommend that you test the multiple domains and watch the progress using Google Webmaster tools…thanks for reading!
@Bristol Design …
If you have a site that contains more than 50K urls … just create multiple sitemaps and reference them from a sitemap index …
For info on that see Google’s info …
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=71453