Cannot upload sitemap from other domain in Google Search Console

Question

In the screenshot of Google Search Console below, I am looking at my property at example.com/my-site.

The black scribble is my site at example.com/my-site, and the yellow is me attempting to link my sitemap at cdn-site.example/id/sitemap.xml. Linking this sitemap through a shared example.com/robots.txt has not worked, probably because there is a relatively unrelated site at example.com.

Is it possible to "Add a new sitemap" with an external file, is there anything I'm missing here?

If not, can I set my sitemap to .../my-site/sitemap.xml in GSC and place a redirect (301) there to my CDN sitemap? Or will Googlebot be upset about the 301?

Answer 1

I had a similar issue:

• My website is: mywebsite.example.com
• My sitemap and sitemap index files are generated and uploaded every night on cdn.example.com/sitemap

I couldn't add my sitemap index file cdn.example.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml in the Google Search Console tool.

So I added this in my website Nginx configuration:

# Nginx configuration for mywebsite.example.com
location /sitemap.xml {
    set $backend https://cdn.example.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml;
    proxy_pass $backend;
    proxy_ssl_server_name on;
}

To get my sitemap index file accessible on mywebsite.example.com/sitemap.xml. I didn't redirect the sitemap files (because I want to keep it simple and don't use rewrite rules if I can), so only my sitemap index is accessible on my website domain. My sitemap index file looks like this:

<!-- mywebsite.example.com/sitemap.xml -->
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <sitemap>
        <loc>https://cdn.example.com/sitemap/sitemap-item-1.xml</loc>
        <lastmod>2022-02-24</lastmod>
    </sitemap>
    <!-- ... -->
</sitemapindex>

It seems to work in the Search Console: my URLs were discovered. But I don't see the sitemap files in the UI, probably because of the different domain. I sent a comment to Google with a screenshot, I'll post an update if I get a response.

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TLDR: If you use a sitemap index file, it seems that you don't need to add your sitemap files in your website domain, only the sitemap index file.

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Edit 2023-04-04 This does not work anymore, I have an error now in the search console.

Now the documentation says:

Your sitemap includes some URLs that are at a higher level or different domain than the sitemap file.

Different domain: Check that the URLs all begin with the same domain as your sitemap location.

Answer 2

I created a server side redirect (301 I believe) at /my-site/sitemap.xml to cdn-site.example/id/sitemap.xml. Worked great!