Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?

[CareerBliss]

We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking.

Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps?

Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here:

http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[DanDeceuster]

You only need to use a sitemap index file if you have over 50,000 URL's. So if your site is that massive, then yes you'll want to do this. Basically all you do is create a bunch of sitemaps. You can then create a sitemap index file that is just a list of links to those sitemaps. You then submit your sitemap index file to google or each sitemap individually. Just glancing at your link it is pretty darn clear, there's not much to it.

[KeriMorgret]

It's easy to implement. I've broken the content up into multiple sitemaps before as a diagnostic tool as well, to see which sections of the site are getting most of their pages indexed and which sections of the site have few pages indexed.