Submitting multiple sitemaps

[azguy]

I recently moved over from html to wordpress. I have the google sitemap plugin on the new wordpress site, but in webmaster tools, it's only showing 71 pages, and I have hundreds, but many are html.

Is it okay, to submit an html sitemap as well as the wp sitemap that's already in there?

[john4math]

I'm not sure about your HTML sitemap; I don't think HTML sitemaps are a supported format for you to submit to Google (I don't see them on sitemaps.org).  You just need Google to crawl this page, and all the pages it links to?  There is a plain text format (see here) that is allowed for sitemaps.  You could probably change your HTML sitemap pretty easily to that format.

I'm pretty sure you're allowed to submit multiple sitemaps, but I can't find anything concrete saying you can or can't.  The Google Webmaster Tools UI seems to support it, so my guess is that it would be fine.  Try it and see if it works?  You could also create a sitemap index file that references both these sitemaps.

You can read more about sitemaps on sitemaps.org.  According to the Google help doc here, they adhere to these standards.

[azguy]

Well, the current sitemap google is recognizing is the wordpress (newer one) that is a .xml.

So how can I create an additional one that will show all the html pages, so google can easily find them?

[AlanBleiweiss]

you can create one manually, or use a sitemap generator.  Just be sure to call it something other than the name of your existing WP generated sitemap.xml file - so it could be sitemaphtml.xml or sitemap2.xml

They need to be in the XML format as outlined by sitemaps.org to be recognized by Google Webmaster Tools - and also submit both to Bing Webmaster Tools.

[AlanBleiweiss]

oh- and add both of them to your robots.txt file or create a sitemapindex.xml file that then lists both, and then just include that index version in the robots.txt file.

[ReneReinholdt]

Google does not support html sitemaps and will only crawl them as any other webpage. But you can submit more xml sitemaps both in bing and google. I personally use a program called sitemap generator.

[azguy]

I'm not saying the sitemap is html, I'm saying the pages are html. And, that already have one xml sitemap that is autogenerated by the new wordpress platform, but I have a ton of html pages the new sitemap is not picking up.

So do I just create another one and add all those pages? So then there will be 2 sitemaps.

Edit: Just ran the sitemap generator. Pretty cool. Now there are some duplicates. So do I need to go in and remove those pages that already show in the first sitemap, or is it okay to have them in both sitemaps?

[azguy]

Well, I created a new sitemap using the above; renamed it; uploaded it to server; submitted it to google, and google did not accept saying error.

[azguy]

Can someone help me here?

I used the sitemap generator, got like 500 plus pages.

I uploaded it to the root of my server, submitted it a second time to google, and got:

Parsing error

We were unable to read your Sitemap. It may contain an entry we are unable to recognize. Please validate your Sitemap before resubmitting.

I don't know how to fix this**.**

[CommercePundit]

I agree with it. If you want to go with multiple XML site maps so you have to wait after submission.

I have very good experience with multiple XML site maps.

I am working on eCommerce website and submitted 24 XML site maps to Google webmaster tools.

Just look in to multiple XML site maps for Lamps Lighting and More!

You can see that Google webmaster tools shows very few index URLs.

I have similar experience for my another eCommerce website where I have submitted 7K+ URLs and 300+ indexed by Google with in 15 days.