Can a sitemap be hosted off-site (e.g., in s3) if you 301 redirect to it?

Question

We compute our sitemap periodically with a chron job and store the results in s3.

Can we 301 redirect https://oursite.com/sitemap.xml to the sitemap.xml hosted on s3?

I know that the sitemap spec requires the sitemap to be on the same domain (http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location). But would a 301 to an off-domain URL be treated by the major search providers as being on the same domain or off of it?

Answer 1

Doing a 301 redirect won't work unfortunately. What you can do though is specify a sitemap index in your main domain and have all your sitemaps added to that index with the fully qualified S3 paths and that will be quuite acceptable according to the standard. Have done this a few times in the past with no issues where exceptionally large sitemaps where involved.