Is it okay to have more than one sitemap?

[Lori99]

Hi, It's been a while since I logged on, however I have a question that I think is worthy of sharing with WebProWorld.

I have a client, we will call them XYZ Corp. for confidential reasons, who has a unique situation in regards to what I was hired to do.

Their corporate site is maintained in Europe – yet each department can maintain their section of their site. I have been hired to SEO one section of the site – basically one product line (about 50 pages). The entire XYZ Corp. site has a sitemap. Is it wrong to create a sitemap for the specific section that I am optimizing? For example

xyzcorp.com/sitemap is the corporate sitemap

xyzcorp.com/product123/sitemap is the product line sitemap

And if I do this, is it wrong to submit the narrowed down sitemap (google, yahoo, etc).

I have done some searching on this and haven’t found much information in regards to this.

Thanks for your help.

[Dubbya]

Great question!!

Q: If my site has multiple sections (e.g. a blog, a forum, and a photo gallery), should I submit one Sitemap for the site, or multiple Sitemaps (one for each section)?
A: You may submit as few or as many Sitemaps as you like (up to these limits). Organize them in whatever way you find easiest to maintain. If you create multiple Sitemaps, you can use a Sitemap Index file to list them all.

Here's how to do it:
How do I create a Sitemap index file?

Good luck.

[Orion]

Looks like you're creating an index of the pages in the site, good idea for navigation etc. not a problem to have an index (table of contents for a section)...

When it comes to SEO though, your google sitemap and yahoo! url lists should be updated and they should include the entire site not just a section.

[MaxPowers]

Several sitemap formats allow for multiple sitemaps. Google's XML sitemap protocol and ROR formatted sitemaps both jump to mind.

If the higher-ups will be willing to change the robots.txt file or use a sitemap index file, you can be added in this way. If you cannot get this type of access on that site, you could always try a simple ping with the full URL of your sitemap.

[chandrika]

I have a site with lots of categories each in a different directory.

There is a site map in each separate directory and each is registered in google webmaster tools, along with main one that has pages outside the categories.

You can register the sitemaps for each sub category as well as main domain one, just using the
site.com/firstsection/sitemap.xml
site.com/secondsection/sitemap.xml

Google recognises that they are all the same site, even though each is registered separately, all stats are put towards the main domains stats, which also has a sitemap
site.com/sitemap.xml
that has pages outside the directories only.

So I have not found any problems from having several site maps, all registered separately and it is simpler for me to keep uptodate.

Maybe it isnt necessary to register each separately and you can just put the urls to other sitemaps in the main domain sitemap, like an index, I didnt think of that when I was doing it, so far though in my experience it has not caused any problems that I just registered them as separate sitemaps.

[business-directory]

We submit several sitemaps for one site, categorized by businesses, products and services. However, it doesn't seem to work with sites like MS and Yahoo, we seem to be able to so submit only one sitemap there. Works fine with google though.

[Big Juice]

Each category should have their own site map that lists all of the files within each category. As for xml sitemaps - one should be enough to help the search engines do their job.

Personally I am not too concerned with helping wealthy search engines conserve their resources as they don't really give us any breaks on anything they do now do they. Perhaps they (search engines) should be giving sites that use the xml site maps some form of special dispensation eh? Now there is a worth while topic of conversation duncha think?

[bj]

Personally I am not too concerned with helping wealthy search engines conserve their resources as they don't really give us any breaks on anything they do now do they. Perhaps they (search engines) should be giving sites that use the xml site maps some form of special dispensation eh? Now there is a worth while topic of conversation duncha think?

I'm sure your competitors love it that you think this way . . .

[Conficio]

Hi Lori,
I think getting a sitemap index file is a great solution for distributed editing of sites, if the corporate IT goes along with it.

It that is not an option, your best bet is to create an RSS or ATOM feed. Google and other SEs take those as sitemaps and you can easily have control just over your sub-section.

Also put the the autodiscovery tag into the head of your section home page

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Plan-B for Software Documentation Atom Feed" href="http://blog.conficio.com/feed/atom/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Plan-B for Software Documentation RSS Feed" href="http://blog.conficio.com/feed/" />

K<o>

[incrediblehelp]

SEOing just part of website? Ouch I feel for you.

[gridsix]

I think you're better served with one site map that covers both...?