Google Says Having An Often Updated Sitemap Might Be A Good Idea

Google’s John Mueller told one webmaster that for his specific example, it might be a good idea for him to have a separate XML sitemap file for URLs that are “often updated.” John said “putting the newer URLs into a single “often updated” sitemap file is probably a good idea here.”

This came up on Twitter where he was asked about “a sitemap with over 250k pages (multilingual pages), split in 18 XML-files.” “The XML’s are all updated frequently and have high priority pages in it but Google doesn’t read them as often,” he added. He then asked “should I make less files? Or put all important pages together?”

John said “putting the newer URLs into a single “often updated” sitemap file is probably a good idea here.” But John added that “if all 250k pages update regularly, it’s always going to be a challenge though.”

So it makes you wonder, if you have specific pages that get updated a lot, should you have an XML sitemap file for those? Do any of you do that? I don’t.

Here are those tweets:

Putting the newer URLs into a single “often updated” sitemap file is probably a good idea here. If all 250k pages update regularly, it’s always going to be a challenge though.

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) October 27, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.