Question about sitemaps

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

• 
  Greg Kristan: Hello,
  
  I have a question about sitemaps.
  
  I'm know that sitemaps need to be in an XML file format to be properly crawled by the search engines, but this particular sitemap looks odd to me. I know the base URL is in an XML format, but the links below are just media links.
  
  Should I be concerned about this? My plan was to either consolidate all of the URL's into the main .xml sitemap, or break out the sitemaps by categories etc. since the current format is all over the place.
  
  What do you guys think? Does this sitemap with the links to the other sitemaps work, or will it not work due to it not being in an XML format?
  
  I see a large amount of URL's submitted, but not a lot have been indexed and I think this could be one of the reasons why that is the case.
  
  Thanks!
• 
  Suraj Gadage: +Greg Kristan I don't see any issues with the current sitemap index file. If you look at the guidelines for creating sitemap index file, you will notice that <loc> tag needs to simply point the location of the sitemap (a child of sitemap). In your sitemap example you are already doing that. Though the URL looks like encrypted but it's still a valid xml sitemap file. I checked that by opening the following URL (confession - I was able to figure out the domain name you tried to hide with the help of advanced search operators).
  
  http:// www(.)domain(.)com/media/?context=bWFzdGVyfHJvb3R8Mzg3ODQ2fHRleHQveG1sfGgzOS9oMTMvODkwNzQzODcxOTAwNi54bWx8ZWRjYTE5OTY3NmFhOTcwMGY4YmNiYzY5MzQ3NmUxZWEwMDJiNjhmODc1Y2RhZDExMTYzNDk3ZDdmZjMyOTY0MA
  
  Hope this helps!
  
  
• 
  Greg Kristan: +Suraj Gadage thanks for looking into this issue for me! Not surprised you were able to figure out the site :)
  
  There are a lot of issues with this sitemap like (404 pages, 301 redirects, 302, 500 error codes, etc) but I wanted to check to see if this current set up would hinder any of the performance, but your answer made a lot of sense.
  
  Thanks!