Sitemaps are a key part of any websites onsite SEO task-list, however what happens when you have a really large website with dozens of categories and hundreds of pages? Do you keep everything within a single sitemap, or do you split it up? Furthermore – what does Google want?!
Well, Google’s John Mueller answered this question during a hangout session back in December:
In practice, it is really up to you – whatever works best for you.
I like the split up the sitemap file because in Search Console you can look at the index stats by sitemap file. And that sometimes makes it a little bit easier to understand. What types of pages are currently being indexed and what pages aren’t being indexed. So you don’t see the specific URLs. But you see from the category pages, I have 90% in indexed. From the product detail pages, I have 70% indexed. And that might be more useful information than if you just see overall I have 72% of my pages indexed. Because that way, you have a little bit more granular information.
So I kind of like splitting things up. But in practice, from a technical point of view on our site, our systems handle both small sitemap files and big sitemap files in the same way. We can process them really quickly. So it’s not that you’d have any technical advantage by doing that.
To summarize all of that for you – Google doesn’t care if you split up your XML sitemaps or not. YOU might want to be able to easily identify which type of content is being indexed and which isn’t – and in that case YOU may benefit from splitting up your links into several sitemaps – however Google couldn’t care less.