A sitemap indexA 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 → XML sitemapsAn 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 indexIndexing 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 Search ConsoleGoogle 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 → .