Sitemap Index

Place at the site root as /sitemap-index.xml or /sitemap.xml. Use when a single sitemap would exceed the 50,000 URL or 50MB uncompressed limit — partition by content type, date range, or section and list those files here.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-pages.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2024-12-01</lastmod>
  </sitemap>

  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-blog.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2024-11-30</lastmod>
  </sitemap>

  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-products.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2024-11-28</lastmod>
  </sitemap>

</sitemapindex>

Field notes

• Submit the index file only — do not also submit individual child sitemaps to Google Search Console. Google follows the index to all children; submitting both creates redundancy that can confuse crawl attribution in GSC reports.
• Reference the index file (not individual sitemaps) in your robots.txt Sitemap: directive.
• Each individual sitemap still has its own 50,000-URL / 50MB limit — the index file itself has no URL limit, but child sitemaps must stay within bounds.
• lastmod in the index should reflect the most recently modified URL date from that child sitemap, not the file generation timestamp.
• The index file is a container only — it holds <sitemap> elements, not <url> elements.