two sitemaps - possible problems?

Question

I am using a web shop software and for some reason the main page (http://www.mysite.com/) is not being listed / generated within the automatic sitemap.xml while every other page is.

My question now: Without dabbling to much into technicalities and why the page is not being generated in the first place I would like to know if this problem can be solved by just simply manually creating an additional sitemap file (calling it sitemap-home.xml) which just contains information related to the index and submit it?

e.g.:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
      <url>
        <loc>http://www.mysite.com/</loc>
        <lastmod>2013-05-05</lastmod>
        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
        <priority>1.0</priority>
      </url>
    </urlset>

Would this approach work and if so, would there be any considerable downsides?

Some expert advise would be appreciated

Answer 1

No. There will not be a problem. At least Google will merge and ignore issues between sitemaps such as duplicate entries.

That being said, it is probably less maintenance to fix the source problem. It really should not be that hard even if it takes special code in the sitemap generated to just add the homepage at the beginning of the sitemap.

Answer 2

You could just ignore the whole thing: Google and Bing will crawl and index the main page regardless. The frequency will depend on how often the page is updated.

Your situation might be a problem for a busy news site which must publish first about some burning topics. But for a web shop, no problem at all.