How to Use Sitemap Index Files to Group Multiple Sitemap Files?

Sitemap is the best way to tell Google and other search engines like Bing about pages on your site.Sitemap is is a list of the pages on your website.You can have multiple Sitemaps for the same site.You can use a single Sitemap for your Videos and images and a different one for your content URLs.
If you provide multiple Sitemaps for the same site or blog the you should list each Sitemap file in a Sitemap index file. Sitemap Index file is a place where you mention all your Sitemap files.
Just like Sitemap restrictions Sitemap index files also has restrictions. Sitemap Index file may not list more than 50,000 Sitemaps and must be no larger than 10MB and can be compressed.

We have already discussed about how to create XML,Video as well as HTML Sitemaps for your blogs and websites. See below the links

• How to create HTML and XML Sitemap (Site Map) for your website.
• How to create a sitemap of blogger (blogspot) blog?
• How to create and add Sitemap of Blogger blog to Google Webmaster?
• Submit your blog sitemap to Bing Search Engine
• How to Add Video Content in Sitemap and Make Your Video Indexable?

A very important thing to remember here is that a Sitemap index file can only specify Sitemaps that are found on the same site as the Sitemap index file and your Sitemap index file must be UTF-8 encoded.
Here also you can have more than one Sitemap index file.See below the sample Sitemap Index file.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2010-01-02T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2010-08-01</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>