I have been arguing a point and would like a second opinion. The basic point of contention is as follows:
We have a site X with a sitemap index file located at:
http://www.x.co.uk/sitemap.xml
This file lists a number of site maps and the structure for the location of the site maps is:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.x.co.uk/sitemap/date/0.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2011-04-07</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.x.co.uk/sitemap/date/1.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2011-04-07</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
As far as i understand things search engines will except this just fine and it will not cause any issues.
However the problem being raise is this, because the actual site XML sits under a directory structure like /sitemap/date/ search engines will not include the URLS. My opinion is that this is incorrect. If anyone can clarify that would be great i have read the documentation on Sitemaps Protocol and would welcome any further articles that could be of use.