(Entry was posted by DocMark Palmere on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 12/12/2019).

Can I create a sitemap in each folder of my site?

Can I create a sitemap in each folder of my site, rather than one big sitemap.xml? Will the search bots and Google see separate site maps as the same as one big one? Do I need to do anything in the core folder to specific many site maps? Thanks for the help. In this case the sitemap.xml in each folder would be listing 10-25 pages -- not 5000.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Sam Mah: Yes, you can but manually create the map yourself. Are you afraid of those 5000 pages would bring down to your rankings?
DocMark Palmere: I`m using a site builder that creates a sitemap and tobots file in the project folder, with a project folder for each major part of the site, ie, root, team, blog, etc. So the tool can create an accurate site map, and I`m told google follows th links from the root to each folder and uses sub folder site maps to index. There are no large folders, so looking to understand.
Graham Washbrook: If you have many sitemaps, you can use a sitemaps index file as a way to submit them at once.

See: Split up your large sitemaps
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712
DocMark Palmere: Very helpful. Dumb SEO team, can you comment on using .gz or .xml in each of the sub site maps? What can you share Graham?
Graham Washbrook: the .gz represents a gzipped (compressed) file - therefore reduces the amount of data transferred

.xml - not compressed
.xml.gz - compressed

It`s a trade off.. compression is intrinsically CPU intensive, yet reducing the amount of data transferred is generally a good idea. Depends on your hosting set up and file size etc etc