Can Sitemaps be combined?

[College Pro]

The new sitemap feature works great when used on a root domain

What if the store is located in a subfolder off the root and there is an existing sitemap for the root domain which does not recognize the store subfolder for its sitemap generation.

Can a second subfolder sitemap be created and submitted to google and or can a sitemap be generated for the subdomain and then combined with the root sitemap?

College Pro

[dutchy]

Yes you can combine as many sitemaps as you want:
You need to create a sitemap for each directory, and then in the root of the domain you need to place a sitemapindex file. So this one is telling the spiders where to find all your sitemaps. (don't forget to include a sitemap for the rootfolder!) You should also put the location of your sitemapindex file (or just the sitemap if you only use one) on top of your robots.txt file. This should look like this:

Sitemap:

The should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such as: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

More info on sitemaps:
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index

Here you can also find the format to use for a sitemap index file


You only need one sitemap for google, msn and yahoo. There is no more need to create separate ones.

Hope this helps you out