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Crawling IndexingSitemap index

Sitemap index file

An XML file that lists other sitemap files, letting a site exceed the 50,000-URL per-file limit and organise sitemaps by section.

In full

A sitemap index uses `<sitemapindex>` and `<sitemap>` elements instead of `<urlset>` and `<url>`, and is itself capped at 50,000 child sitemaps. Only one level of nesting is permitted, an index may not point at another index. Beyond scale, segmenting sitemaps by template or section turns Search Console's per-sitemap indexing counts into a cheap diagnostic for which parts of a site are being dropped.

Example

`/sitemap.xml` lists `/sitemap-products-1.xml` through `/sitemap-products-6.xml` plus `/sitemap-blog.xml`.

Related terms

XML sitemap

An XML file listing URLs a site wants crawled, optionally with lastmod dates, used as a discovery aid by Google, Bing and other engines.

Indexing

Storing and organising a crawled page in a search engine's index so it becomes eligible to be retrieved and ranked for queries.

Index bloat

A condition where a site has far more URLs indexed or crawlable than it has genuinely useful pages, diluting crawl attention and…

Crawl budget

The number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given period, set by crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.

Google News sitemap

A specialised sitemap containing only articles published in the last two days, using the news namespace to speed discovery for Google News…

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