Sitemap or Sitemaps for Magento and Wordpress?

[chrishansen]

I'm trying to figure out what to do with our sitemap situation.

We have a magento install for our shopping cart
sdhydroponics.com
and a wordpress install on
sdhydroponics.com/resources

In Magento we get the XML sitemap manually by going to Catalog => Google Sitemap => Add Sitemap

In wordpress we use Google XML sitemaps plugin.

My questions are:

• Do I need both of these sitemaps? Or can I use one or the other?
• If I use both, do I make one sitemap1.xml and the other sitemap2.xml and drop them in the root?
• How do I make sure google knows I have 2 sitemaps?
• Anything else I should know?

Thank You

[marcinlejman]

If want to have a sitemap, you actually need two of them in your case, as both will include different links from different parts of your website (Magento-based and Wordpress-based).

You don't need both sitemaps in the root. Your wordpress sitemap can be in the "resources" directory , as the only restriction is that sitemaps cannot refer URLs higher in the directory tree. As all your wordpress URLs have "resources" as their base, there is no problem here.

To notify Google of your sitemaps, add your site to Google Webmaster Tools (http://google.com/webmasters) and go to Site configuration / Sitemaps. From there, you will be able to both test your sitemap, add it, and later, when already added, you will see its indexing rate.

You will also gain a lot of valuable insight by adding your site to Google Webmaster Tools, so you should do it anyway.

If you have more questions, I will be glad to help you further.

[chrishansen]

@Marcin - Thank you, I have 1 followup question.   After I add both sitemaps to webmaster tools, I have the line 
'Sitemap: http://sdhydroponics.com/sitemap.xml' 
in my robots.txt file. Should I also add a second line 
'Sitemap: http://sdhydroponics.com/resources/wordpress_sitemap.xml'
or leave it alone?

[RyanKent]

Marcin's answer is correct. A couple items to add-on:

• you can indicate the location of your sitemaps in your robots.txt file

• if you do update your sitemaps in Google, I suggest taking the same action for Bing. While Google does control about 70% of the search market, keep in mind Bing + Yahoo is the other 30% and the traffic is significant.

• there are ways to provide a single sitemap but your choice would either be having an external tool crawl your site (not recommended) or having a coder either merge the sitemaps or provide an internal solution.