Multiple sitemap for a site?

[Mark Adams]

My site has more than 50 k pages. i will need to create multiple sitemaps(xml) to include all urls. Can i create like sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml and directly upload to root?
Does it need any special coding to index both sitemaps. If so please advice.

[Robert]

Mark,

you must know that Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs so if you have more than 50K pages so in this case split the pages in 2 or more than three part and create the sitemap as

http://example.com/sitemap-1.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-2.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-3.xml

and one main sitemap for search engine like http://example.com/sitemap.xml

After building your XML sitemap, you should upload all the generated XML sitemap files, e.g. sitemap.xml, sitemap-1.xml, sitemap-2.xml etc.

You should also upload the main sitemap file, here called sitemap.xml. You will need to submit this file to the search engines as shown you above.

Below is an example the main sitemaps file where you can see how it references each generated site map file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://example.com/sitemap.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2010-10-10</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://example.com/sitemap-2.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2010-10-10</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

you can also check the reference as below.

[Robert]

You can create multiple sitemaps. Google accepts up to 500 sitemaps. Ref: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin...swer=71453

After creating sitemaps (say sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml,etc) you need to create a sitemap index file. This is for indexing all the sitemaps. The format is
-------------------------------------------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/
schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<sitemap>

<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>

<lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00
</lastmod>

</sitemap>

<sitemap>

<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>

<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>

</sitemap>
.........
.........
........
</sitemapindex>
----------------------------------
with file name http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml

Note: the sitemap file must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB.

here you can see methods for creating sitemap for a single domain and subdomain http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

After creating the index file submit that file to webmaster tools.