14

Just out of curiosity, I have developed a small app analysing and generating sitemaps for a given domain.

Can I tell search engines to look for the sitemap of a given domain on my app using a dynamic url i.e. can you use cross-domain sitemaps.xml without validating you are owner of the destination domain?

For example :

http://example.com/mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

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  • Thanks for the link edit, it was automatically converted. ;) – iammichiel Apr 3 '12 at 15:30
11

Yes, you can do this, just make sure you specify the file's location in your robots.txt file.

I've had to do this for a site where I had limited access to the file structure, so I know it works - looks like other people have tried too.

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  • Any idea how to do this? I've checked Google Webmaster, when I try to add a sitemap, the domain is readonly. – iammichiel Apr 3 '12 at 15:30
  • @Zenklys apologies, you're correct you have to do it via robots.txt and not the webmaster control panel. – toomanyairmiles Apr 3 '12 at 15:45
  • No need to apologize, was simply asking if it was possible :) Thanks for the info! – iammichiel Apr 3 '12 at 17:26
  • Yep, worked for me as well. There was a page on microsoft marketplace that was not captured by google's crawler because it used query string as location, but then I added this link to the sitemap on one of my domains and text from this page started appearing in google results. Even though google console reported line with this domain as an error :/ – Klesun May 3 at 2:25

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