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Here is another SEO Snippets video, this one on the basic topic of submitting more than 50,000 URLs via your sitemap file to Google. In short, John Mueller of Google said you can submit multiple sitemap files if you need to submit more URLs and even if you have fewer than 50,000 URLs, you can still split up your Sitemap files into multiple versions because it is useful for debugging and other reasons.
Here is the video:
Here is the transcript:
Today's question is about sitemap files. Mike from India asks, how do we add a sitemap for more than 50,000 URLs?Sitemap files are a great way to make your content known to Google and to other search engines. However, they're limited to 50,000 URLs per file.
What do you do if you have more URLs?
You can generate more than one sitemap file per website. You can either submit these individually, for example, through a Search Console, or you can create a sitemap index file.
A sitemap index file is like a sitemap file for sitemaps. You can list multiple sitemap files in it. If you use a sitemap index file, you can just submit that file for your website in Search Console. Even if you have fewer than 50,000 URLs, you can submit multiple sitemap files. For example, you might want to do that to keep track of different sections of your website, or just in general to make maintenance of your sitemap files a little bit easier.
When it comes to creating sitemap files, we strongly recommend that you have these made automatically through your server directly. That's the best way to make sure that your new and updated content is highlighted to search engines as quickly as possible. Most modern content management systems will take care of this for you. Often, it is just a matter of flipping a switch in your control panel to turn these on.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
