Mobile Sitemap Best Practices w/ Responsive Design

[AdamDorfman]

I'm looking for insight into mobile sitemap best practices when building sites with responsive design.  If a mobile site has the same urls as the desktop site the mobile sitemap would be very similar to the regular sitemap.

Is a mobile sitemap necessary for sites that utilize responsive design?

If so, is there a way to have a mobile sitemap that simply references the regular sitemap or is a new sitemap that has all urls tagged with the "" tag with each url required?

[BenRWoodard]

I'm gonna say no.  You don't need to make a separate mobile site map for a mobile design.  Unless, you have different url's that are being called up by a mobile screen as apposed to a desktop screen.  Depending on the size of the site, I would include those different domains as part of the same sitemap. The only times I would make a separate sitemap for a mobile site on a responsive design would be if I needed to see what pages were being indexed on my intended mobile URL's or if I had a huge amount of URL's and had to divide up the sitemap anyway.

[MarloSchneider]

Google has a separate mobile crawler. This crawler probably uses guidelines from the mobile sitemap instead of the desktop sitemap.

I think it is worthwhile to make a separate mobile sitemap even with responsive design so Google knows those are the mobile as well as desktop pages.