Technical SEO FAQ · XML Sitemaps & Robots.txt
How do you design XML sitemaps for millions of URLs?
Use sitemap indexes and split URL sets into manageable sitemap files according to the sitemap protocol limits.
Common segmentation:
sitemap-index.xml
├── products-001.xml
├── products-002.xml
├── categories.xml
├── articles-001.xml
└── locations.xml
Segmenting by content type also improves diagnostics.
Monitor each sitemap separately in Search Console.
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