using multiple sitemaps in a domain

Question

I have a domain http://sub.example.com/.

In it there is a wordpress blog at http://sub.example.com/blog and other more static content at http://sub.example.com/other, http://sub.example.com/stuff, etc, etc

As the blog content is updated quite often I use a WP sitemap plugin to generate it for the blog dynamically for convenience. Is there any penalty/negatives in using this while also maintaining a separate one for the whole subdomain bar this blog at http://sub.example.com/sitemap.xml?

Answer 1

Multiple sitemaps are perfectly fine. There's a special way to tell the search engines you have them.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Just make sure you follow that specification and you're all set.