Multiple Sitemaps on a single Domain

Google makes it easier for webmasters to place Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single host and then letting them know by including the location of these Sitemaps in the appropriate robots.txt.

Do you have more than one website, or rather lots of them? You can now reduce one hassle of the many that goes in maintaining lots of websites, blogs — the ability to place Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single host through robots.txt.

We know how to include auto-discovery of Sitemaps using robots.txt. Google have announced a new way for Sitemap cross-submissions using Google Webmaster Tools, making it possible to submit Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single dedicated host.

HOW TO DO IT

For instance, if I want to submit and maintain Sitemaps for each of my blogs –

and to make things easier, I want to host all the Sitemaps on brajeshwar.com.

I can make the best out of cross-submission support by telling the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft) where the Sitemaps are with robots.txt –

The robots.txt for brajeshwar.com would include: Sitemap: http://www.brajeshwar.com/sitemap-www-brajeshwar.xml
Similarly, the robots.txt for odetoapple.com would include: Sitemap: http://www.brajeshwar.com/sitemap-www-odetoapple.xml
And for the third one, the robots.txt for blog.oinam.com would include: Sitemap: http://www.brajeshwar.com/sitemap-blog-oinam.xml

Here are a few other useful notes about the implementation (from Microsoft)

robots.txt can have multiple “Sitemap:” references.
Limit the size of robots.txt file to less than 1 MB.
If multiple sitemaps for a domain include the same URL with conflicting metadata (i.e. priority, change frequency, etc), the metadata will be disregarded and just the URL will be considered.
Individual sitemap files should never be larger than 10 MB when uncompressed. This includes all sitemap file formats: XML, RSS and Text.

References

Yahoo! — Making Sitemaps Easier to Manage and Scale
Microsoft — Microsoft to Support Cross-Domain Sitemaps

Note: For Wordpress powered blogs, this may be nothing to worry about as there are good plugins that maintains the Sitemaps auto-magically for you.

Brajeshwar posted this article on Thu, Feb 28th, 2008 at 5:30 am
Categorized under Asides, Technology and has the following tags

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