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Light Dark Use Device Settings Advertise Contact Us Home / Google News / Google SEO / Google: Why Split Your XML Sitemap File Google: Why Split Your XML Sitemap File May 22, 2026 - 7:41 am 1 — by Barry SchwartzBarry Schwartz / Executive Editor
Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his expertise in the search marketing industry. He only provides consulting services to expert SEOs and also performs search marketing expert witness services. Barry graduated from the City University of New York and lives with his family in the NYC region. You can follow Barry on Twitter at @rustybrick or on LinkedIn and read his full bio over here. 38,445 Articles as barry.schwartz Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization
For many many years, some SEOs have a strategy of breaking up their XML sitemap files into categories. SEOs do it for various reasons, sometimes it is dependent on the site and site structure.
One person on Reddit asked why do people do it...
John Mueller from Google replied offering some reasons he has seen over the years:
- Want to track different kinds of urls in groups ("product detail page sitemap" vs "product category sitemap" -- which you can kinda do with the page indexing report)
- Split by freshness (evergreen content in a separate sitemap file - theoretically a search engine might not need to check the "old" sitemap as often; I don't know if this actually happens tho)
- Proactively split (so that you don't get to 50k and have to urgently figure out how to change your setup)
- Hreflang sitemaps (can take a ton of space, so the 50k URLs could make the files too large)
- My computer did it, I don't know why
There are plenty of other reasons why some SEOs might do this but those are from John.
Forum discussion at Reddit.
I am currently offline for the Shavout holiday, this post was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today.
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