When we talk about sitemap it’s a guideline or you can say summery of the website. There are two types of sitemap which are generally found on different websites are XML and HTML.
XML is a simplified form of SGML (standard generalized markup language) intended for documents that are published on the Web. XML sitemap is used normally because it is crawling friendly, it helps search engine crawlers and internet users to find the information and content they are looking for, whereas HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications, basically designed for web users and it is placed on the home page at footer of the website which is static for all pages.
Multiple types of Sitemap are found and they are compatible for most of the sites but XML and HTML are highly recommended for every website.
Types of Sitemap:
HTML-Sitemap
XML-Sitemap
Image-Sitemap
Video-Sitemap
News-Sitemap
Mobile-Sitemap
Multiple Sitemap:
The main reason that necessitates the need to have multiple sitemaps is the size of the site. Sitemaps come with size limitations in that one sitemap cannot hold more than 50,000 URLs and should not be more than 10 MB in size. As such, when you have a site that has over 50,000 URLs, then you need to have multiple sitemaps that can accommodate these links.
When it comes to the size of the files it should be as small as possible because you don't want to get up in the morning and see that your website is not working anymore or it's taking so much time to load that it better to close the window.
If you are updating your sitemap on a regular basis then you should keep a single file only so that Google can crawl regularly to keep your site search queries.
Why do you need Multiple Sitemaps?
The main reason why you should consider adding more than one sitemaps is not only to minimize crowding of links but also to ensure that every single page is crawled and indexed by the search engines.
Multiple sites maps may not increase your website's Page Rank but it will enhance better online visibility of your website.
For E.g. if your website is a content directory or blogging website with several authors, creating multiple sitemaps for every author allows their articles to be easily crawled and found by the search engine bots.
Sitemap Index:
If you have created multiple sitemaps for your website, then you should create a sitemap index, which is the lists all the sitemaps in the website. The steps that need to be followed when creating this index are similar to those followed when creating a sitemap. The only difference is that <loc> and </loc> tags should contain values on the location of the sitemaps.
Errors which you can avoid:
When you create multiple sitemaps or any sitemap in your website, it very important to be sure that there are no white spaces preceding the tags. It can lead to the broken links and search engines may not be able to crawl your website correctly. If the links are not complete or have any special characters which are not readable by a search engine it can create a negative impact on SEO.
You have to also ensure that all the plugins which are used in the website should be well coded and working properly so that it wont create the conflicts between your website and search engine.
Number of Sitemaps you actually require:
There is no such requirement you can have multiple sitemaps or multiple language sitemaps it totally depends on your website, if your website is having more than 50,000 URLs in total then it’s better to have bifurcated them or else for small websites XML sitemap is enough
Multi language Sitemap:
If your website is having Multi language content domains like Lg.com then it is advisable to have Multi language sitemap so that your website can manage all the languages and their peculiarities. For making it easy modifications in future you can divide your sitemap into segments.
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