Multiple Sitemap: entries in robots.txt?
I have been searching around using Google but I can't find an answer to this question.
A robots.txt file can contain the following line:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex.xml
but is it possible to specify multiple sitemap index files in the robots.txt and have the search engines recognize that and crawl ALL of the sitemaps referenced in each sitemap index file? For example, will this work:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex1.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex2.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex3.xml
Answer
Yes it is possible to have more than one sitemap-index-file:
You can have more than one Sitemap index file.
Highlight by me.
Yes it is possible to list multiple sitemap-files within robots.txt, see as well in the sitemap.org site:
You can specify more than one Sitemap file per robots.txt file.
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-host1.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-host2.xml
Highlight by me, this can not be misread I'd say, so simply spoken, this can be done.
This is also necessary for cross-submits, for which btw. the robots.txt has been chosen.
Btw Google, Yahoo and Bing, all are members of sitemaps.org:
Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.
So you can rest assured that your sitemap entries will be properly read by the search engine bots.
Submitting them via webmaster tools can not hurt either - as John Mueller commented.