How To Specify Multiple Sitemaps With Robots.txt

Specifying multiple sitemaps with robots.txt is actually pretty easy. It involves creating a simple sitemap index file… Instead of using sitemap: in your robots.txt file to point to each sitemap, you can use it to point to the index file.

The indexes are not hard to make, here is a really basic one:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
   <sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.gz</loc>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
   </sitemap>
   </sitemapindex>

Apparently you can also use the “lastmod” option to let the SE know when each sitemap was last updated, but I see no reason to use it.

Save the index file, then all you have to do is put “Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemapindex.xml” into your robots.txt file and you’re done.

Here is a link to Google’s official page on sitemap index files.

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