Sitemap Index

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 → is a parent file that bundles not individual URLs but several 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 Console.