Should I have two XML sitemaps?
My website has 13 pages, the blog section on my website has 46 pages. The blog has an XML sitemap that is automatically generated at "website.com/blog/sitemap.xml". Should I have 2 sitemaps, one for the main site and one for the blog? Or should I just have one sitemap for the blog since the main site doesn't have many pages?
If I make 2 sitemaps, should I mention them both in website.com/robots.txt? Or mention one in website.com/robots.txt and the other in website.com/blog/robots.txt?
Really appreciate any help with this.
Hi @bogla and thanks for being part of SEO Forum community. Great question, thanks for that!
You may have as many XML sitemaps as you want. There is limitation though - XML sitemaps shouldn't contain more than 50,000 URLs. In your case, it doesn't make too much sense to decouple blog pages from other pages, as you are far from the limit.
If you're looking for logical distinction (which is perfectly fine), you can do it as you mentioned above. In that case, you would either use third sitemap, which is going to be index sitemap for other, lower tier sitemap files (containing links to them) OR you would end up having two top tier sitemap files, in which case you'd mention both in your robots.txt. Anyway, you should be OK with single sitemap.
Specifying more than one Sitemap file in robots.txt is fine.
For more details, check:
Multiple Sitemaps in the same directory
Informing search engine crawlers
Hope it helps!
Thank you @ms. Just to make clear, should I cite to both sitemaps in example.com/robots.txt? The blog sitemap is in the blog directory
Edited my response to be more clear.
So, you either use two different sitemaps, both top level - you need to make robots aware of both files in such case.
OR you use multiple sitemaps while having just one top-level sitemap, which is index sitemap with all underlaying sitemaps included in it. That way, you would mention just the index sitemap in your robots.txt file.
