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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?

enter image description here

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  • Could you host your full sitemap at /my-site/sitemap.xml? External sitemaps are supposedly supported, but I've never seen anybody actually get them to work.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Feb 1, 2022 at 8:40
  • I have the same problem (my site is foo.mydomain.com and my sitemap is on bar.mydomain.com). I didn't find any solutions for now.
    – Junior Dussouillez
    Feb 1, 2022 at 13:55
  • In my team the process for doing that is long, a redirect or GSC-centered fix would be much faster and more straightforward. And updating the sitemap build script to write to a local assets folder would also be complicated. –
    – James L.
    Feb 1, 2022 at 18:21

2 Answers 2

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

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I had a similar issue :

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

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

So I added this in my website Nginx configuration :

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

To get my sitemap index file accessible on mywebsite.mycompany.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.mycompany.com/sitemap.xml -->
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <sitemap>
        <loc>https://cdn.mycompany.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.

Google Search Console - sitemap index with sitemaps on another domain

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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