What if we need to combine multiple sitemaps for a main domain or subdomain? Here’s how to do it by creating sitemap index.
Sitemap index
Let’s say our site has a regular sitemap.xml and a blog/sitemap.xml, but we want Google to crawl and index both. To combine them we need to rename the original to something else like main_sitemap.xml and then create an index of all sitemaps we have:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>https://deploymentfromscratch.com/main_sitemap.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>https://deploymentfromscratch.com/blog/sitemap.xml</loc>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
And that’s it, both sitemaps then stay exactly same as before. Optionally we can include <lastmod> tag for latest modification.
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