A A sitemap index is a parent sitemap file that references several individual XML sitemaps. It is needed when a website exceeds the size limits of a single sitemap.Open glossary entry → is a parent file that bundles not individual URLs but several An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file listing a website's important URLs. It helps search engines discover content more efficiently but does not replace internal linking or guarantee indexing.Open glossary entry →. It is used when a website exceeds the limits of a single sitemap: at most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed.
Example:
<sitemapindex>...<sitemap><loc>https://example.ch/sitemap-products.xml</loc></sitemap>...</sitemapindex>
A sensible split of the child sitemaps can follow content type, for example:
- pages,
- blog articles,
- products,
- categories,
- images or videos,
- language versions.
Even smaller sites benefit from this segmentation, because errors are easier to spot per section. The sitemap Indexing is the step in which a search engine processes crawled content and decides whether a URL is added to the search index. Only indexed pages can appear in search results.Open glossary entry → is submitted in Google Google Search Console (GSC) is a free Google tool that shows how a website performs in organic search, with data on impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position, plus indexing and technical issues.Open glossary entry →.