Build a sitemap index file to organize sitemaps for a site exceeding the per-sitemap URL limit
domain: sitemaps-org · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Split your URLs across multiple individual sitemap files so that no single file exceeds 50000 URLs or 50 MB when uncompressed
Create a sitemap index file (sitemapindex XML format) that lists the location and optional lastmod for each child sitemap file
Ensure the sitemap index file itself does not reference more than 50000 child sitemaps and does not exceed the 50 MB size limit
Compress all sitemap files with gzip to reduce transfer size and serve them with the correct Content-Type header (application/xml or text/xml)
Submit only the sitemap index URL to Google Search Console; Google will discover and process each child sitemap automatically from the index
Known gotchas
Each individual sitemap file within the index must also respect the 50000 URL and 50 MB limits; the index file itself only points to child sitemaps and does not contain URL entries
The lastmod date in a sitemap entry is used by Google as a hint for recrawl priority, not a guarantee; setting inaccurate or stale lastmod values trains Google to distrust your timestamps and can reduce crawl frequency for genuinely updated pages
Sitemap index files and child sitemaps must be accessible from within the same host as the URLs they list; a sitemap hosted on cdn.example.com cannot list URLs on www.example.com unless you verify both as the same property or use a DNS-level sitemap
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