Google sitemap just for a part of site?

[haest]

Hi,

I am about reorganize (content and seo-wise) a part of a larger site and I wondered if it is possible to use a Google sitemap just for some but not all pages of a site?

Does anyone know if this has any impact on pages that are not included in the sitemap?

Thanks

[Nobody1560986989723]

To be honest a sitemap.xml is predominantly there to inform search engines of all your site's pages and their importance in your structure.

It's helpful to keep this up to date, so that the right pages are appearing quickly in the SERPs.

However a site with the right content in robots.txt and/or robots META tags will get crawled and, if the site is well structured and the internal links are all present, then all the pages of a site will end up in the SERPS anyway.

My question back to you would be - are there pages that you don't want to appear in Google's results and if so, why? The reason I ask this is that usually it's about excluding pages from search engines rather than making sure pages are included (assuming site structure and internal links are good).

[haest]

Hi Martin,

no it's not about excluding pages.

I am working on a part of a larger site and I'd just like to see my changes to be crawled as fast as possible, that's all. For that reason I thought about submitting a sitemap just for that part (doing it for the whole site is too time consuming at the moment).

But I just wondered if it's possible. If not I just wait until Googlebot has done crawling the new pages.

[Nobody1560986989723]

You can add multiple sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools, that's not a problem. So you could, I suppose, add a sitemap of just your new pages.

In my opinion though, I think you should just generate a new one at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com and upload and resubmit it. That would work just as well as a part sitemap.

If your site is really large though, maybe the part sitemap is the right answer, but going forward you'll have to remember which bits appear in which sitemap so you don't have overlap or accidental omissions.

Hope this helps.