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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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