Hot answers tagged sitemap
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For an average website that supports both rel="canonical" links for both m.domain.com and www.domain.com should only ever need to use 1 sitemap by using Annotation in Sitemaps.
So even if your website is responsive or supports both using different URL you should only ever need to use one sitemap (for standard sites).
Now since your question is about ...
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Unfortunately, only sitemap_index's can have other sitemap's in them. You have two options as far as I can tell:
You could add a sitemap_index, and then link to your other two sitemaps from there.
You could just add both of your sitemaps to your robots.txt file (more info)
Alternatively, you could also disregard both of the above and just submit each of ...
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You'll want both in the root of the site, especially robots.txt because that's where Bot's will be looking for it. The Sitemap could go anywhere, but it would make the most sense in your case to put it in the root, rather than having several sitemaps for each additional language you add in the future.
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I wouldn't worry about "cloaking" on files that are meant only for the consumption of robots. Showing a 403 Forbidden status when the user-agent isn't Googlebot should be fine on a sitemap file. Google cares about cloaking when users see different results than Googlebot. In this case, Google is never going to refer users to the sitemap at all.
I often ...
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If I read your question right is that basically you do not want users or any other bots than Bing and Google having the ability to visit sitemap.xml as the contents of the sitemap are generated real time which could cause additional server load that you want to avoid.
If I'm correct you are approaching this in the wrong manner and there should be no reason ...
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No. There will not be a problem. At least Google will merge and ignore issues between sitemaps such as duplicate entries.
That being said, it is probably less maintenance to fix the source problem. It really should not be that hard even if it takes special code in the sitemap generated to just add the homepage at the beginning of the sitemap.
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The Sitemap is an external file. There is no code to insert in your HTML pages.
The sitemap aims to list all urls of your website in order to help search engines to index them. If your website doesn't have a lot of pages or if Google indexes your web pages correctly, I wouldn't recommend you to spend too much time on it.
Google explains how to manually ...
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This is a sitemap intended for web-crawlers. It is not inserted in any page but left as a separate XML file on your server. By the way, there is also a text version of this which is simply one absolute URL per line in a text-file. It does not have any metadata though.
For it to be found, you simply add a line identifying the file from your robots.txt. This ...
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