Site maps created for different categories.

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

• 
  Charu Rastogi: How google algorithm does work for the site maps created for different categories section. Say I have a big website and I want to segregated XML sitemap for each category so how google will treat it? I am facing an issue as it is not updating on regular basis. ;
  
  #xmlsitemap  ; #googlealgorithm  ;
• 
  Federico Sasso: Segmenting XML Sitemaps is perfectly OK with Google. Not only is a way to avoid sitemap size limits imposed by the protocol (10MB, 50K URLs), but it helps having a better idea of which sections are more indexed and which are not.
  A work of caution: keep the sitemap datasets not overlaying. It would not cause a problem per-se, but the total count of indexed pages reported in GWT/Sitemaps is just a sum of the single sitemap values and does not take into account the datasets could overlay.
• 
  Federico Sasso: Yes +Jim Munro, 50K URLs is what I meant ;-) thank you! (typo fixed)
• 
  Charu Rastogi: Thanks +Federico Sasso ;for your time.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 02:17:52 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/site_maps_created_for_different_categories +Charu Rastogi
  
  The cuetimes listed on this page are functional while the live broadcast continues and also once Youtube has finished processing the public broadcast. Processing time varies between 6-24 hours. During this period the clip is viewable in full but the cuetimes cannot be relied on. ;
  
  If our assistance with this issue was useful to you, please consider sharing your success story so that others might benefit.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: I guess with segregated sitemap you mean Sitemapindex:
   ; http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#index
• 
  Charu Rastogi: Many Thanks +Edwin Jonk ;...will recheck as per the URL provided.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: You can also have more than one Sitemapindex. You can inform the search engines about those Sitemapindex files in your robots.txt [1]. However a Sitemapindex cannot point to a Sitemapindex [2]:
  
  A Sitemap index file can't list other Sitemap index files, but only Sitemap files.
  
  To give you an idea how many URL's you can include by using Sitemapindex and robots.txt take a look at the robots.txt of Google+ [3]. Here only two Sitemapindex files are mentioned.
  
  [1] ;http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#informing
  [2] ;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35738?hl=en
  [3] ;https://plus.google.com/robots.txt