google sitemap

Most of you should be aware of what an sitemap index file does. It just lists out the list of all the sitemaps for a particular website. This sitemap index file had a Google limit of 1000 links. Anyone who exceeds this index limit would get a warning in your Google Webmaster account that, “The list of Sitemaps in your Sitemap index exceeds the maximum allowed. A Sitemap index can contain no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Split your Sitemap index into multiple Sitemap index files and ensure that each contains no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Then, resubmit your Sitemap index files individually.”

It now appears that Google has increased this limit of 1,000 sitemap files to 50,000 sitemap files. This is a substantial increase in Google’s indexing capacity. Now, webmasters would be able to submit 2.5 billion URLs to Google to crawl. Isn’t that amazing?

Most of you should be aware of what an sitemap index file does. It just lists out the list of all the sitemaps for a particular website. This sitemap index file had a Google limit of 1000 links. Anyone who exceeds this index limit would get a warning in your Google Webmaster account that, “The list of Sitemaps in your Sitemap index exceeds the maximum allowed. A Sitemap index can contain no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Split your Sitemap index into multiple Sitemap index files and ensure that each contains no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Then, resubmit your Sitemap index files individually.”

It now appears that Google has increased this limit of 1,000 sitemap files to 50,000 sitemap files. This is a substantial increase in Google’s indexing capacity. Now, webmasters would be able to submit 2.5 billion URLs to Google to crawl. Isn’t that amazing?

Well, if you have a site more than 1000 pages, you would have wondered this. How many URLs can I stuff inside one sitemap? The sitemap has become considerablily big. Will Google index all the pages I have mentioned inside?

Well this is what Google has to say.

1. You can have a maximum of 50,000 URLs in one sitemap. Isn’t that cool?
2. The sitemap file should not be over 10MB in size when uncompressed. Hmm. Sounds fair.
3. If you have more than 50,000 URLs create multiple sitemaps and list them in a Sitemap Index File
4. Your sitemap index file should not cross 1,000 sitemaps

I guess these 4 guidelines by Google would resolve all your queries. I am not sure about Yahoo or MSN. If any of SEO Mind readers have an answer, please do post them here.

Do you have your own personal website and do not wish to outsource optimizing the website due to budget and privacy constraints? Do you think you need to know a lot about HTML coding to optimize your website?

Read the full story

Sitemap creation varies with search engines. Google accepts sitemaps in XML or Python format and Yahoo requests for sitemaps in txt format.
Read the full story