Deciding whether to split sitemaps or not depends on the scale and structure of your website. In some cases, splitting sitemaps can be beneficial, while in other cases, using a single sitemap is more suitable.
Reasons to split sitemaps
- Easy management: If your website is large with numerous pages, splitting sitemaps helps you manage and update content more easily.
- Function-based division: Splitting sitemaps according to different functional sections of your website (e.g., blog, products, services) aids users and search engines in accessing specific areas of interest.
- Improving indexing: Smaller sitemaps can enhance indexing speed and the search performance of your website.
How many links should a sitemap contain?
There's no specific number for the maximum links in a sitemap, but you should generally aim to limit the number of links to ensure the sitemap doesn't become overly large. Google's guidelines suggest that a sitemap should have a maximum of 50,000 URLs and should not exceed 50MB in size.
How to split sitemaps
- Categorize content: Identify different types of content on your website, such as blog posts, product pages, service pages.
- Create sub-sitemaps: Based on categorization, create sub-sitemaps for each type of content. Use XML format and include links and supplementary information.
- Link sub-sitemaps: In the main sitemap or in the robots.txt file, add links to the sub-sitemaps. This informs search engines about all the sitemaps of your website.
Note that when splitting sitemaps, ensure that sub-sitemaps still provide sufficient information and are linked together to help search engines understand the structure of your website.