Should I have a separate sitemap for mobile pages and include that in my robots.txt?

Question

I am working on site that has 20 mobile-friendly pages which are located under a /mobile directory.

Should I have a separate sitemap for these mobile pages and include both this and the desktop sitemap in the robots.txt file? Would the sitemap for the mobile pages be placed in those files?

For example:

Sitemap: http://www.example.co.uk/sitemap.xml

Sitemap: http://www.example.co.uk/mobile/sitemap.xml

Answer 1

The short answer is it doesn't matter. Google doesn't really care where your sitemap is located as long as it can find it.

My personal preference would be to have one 'main' sitemap at example.co.uk/sitemap.xml that lists different maps for your site. This way you could have one map for your desktop pages and one for your mobile pages, for example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.co.uk/non-mobile.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.co.uk/mobile.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   </sitemapindex>