Sitemaps for landing pages

[bwaller]

Good morning MOZ Community,

We've been doing some re-vamping recently on our primary sitemap, and it's currently being reindexed by the search engines.

We have also been developing landing pages, both for SEO and SEM. Specifically for SEO, the pages are focused on specific, long-tail search terms for a number of our niche areas of focus. Should I, or do I need to be considering a separate sitemap for these? Everything I have read about sitemaps simply indicates that if a site has over 50 thousand pages or so, then you need to split a sitemap.

Do I need to worry about a sitemap for landing pages? Or simply add them to our primary sitemap? Thanks in advance for your insights and advice.

[dohertyjf]

Hi there! Good question.

First, each individual XML sitemap should only have a maximum of 50k URLs in it. At the scale of millions of pages I always recommend splitting out your sitemaps by type so that you can monitor indexation by section of the site.

If I were you I'd create a separate sitemap for landing pages and exclude the PPC landing pages unless those are the same pages you've created for SEO.

Cheers!

[bwaller]

John,

Thanks so much for the reply – So there's no harm in submitting a secondary sitemap, specifically for landing pages? Great to hear and yes, many of the landing pages overlap for both SEO and PPC.

Thanks!
Brendan

[dohertyjf]

Absolutely no harm at all.  Do you have an index sitemap that you list all the sub-sitemaps from? If not you should do that as well just for sanity of sitemap management.

[bwaller]

John,

Good to know – At this point I only have our primary sitemap submitted to Search Console, but I will create and add a secondary sitemap. I don't see us adding a ton of secondary-like sitemaps, you still suggest making a sitemap index of sorts?

[Terakeet]

Yes, any URL that has over 50,000 URL's should have a sitemap_index, within that xml sitemap index should have listed the other category specific URL sitemaps. These are best organized in the hierarchy of the website structure to reinforce your schematic URL structure.