Google’s John Mueller answered a question about how many sitemaps to upload, and then said there are no guarantees that any of the URLs will be crawled right away.
A member of the r/TechSEO community on Reddit asked if it’s enough to upload the main sitemap.xml file, which then links to the more granular sitemaps. What prompted the question was their concern over recently changing their website page slugs (URL file names).
That person asked:
“I submitted “sitemap.xml” to Google Search Console, is this sufficient or do I also need to submit page-sitemap.xml and sitemap-misc.xml as separate entries for it to work?
I recently changed my website’s page slugs, how long will it take for Google Search Console to consider the sitemap”
Mueller responded that uploading the sitemap index file (sitemap.xml) was enough and that Google would proceed from there. He also shared that it wasn’t necessary to upload the individual granular sitemaps.
What was of special interest were his comments indicating that uploading sitemaps didn’t “guarantee” that all the URLs would be crawled and that there is no set time for when Googlebot would crawl the sitemap URLs. He also suggested using the Inspect URL tool.
He shared:
“You can submit the individual ones, but you don’t really need to. Also, sitemaps don’t guarantee that everything is recrawled immediately + there’s no specific time for recrawling. For individual pages, I’d use the inspect URL tool and submit them (in addition to sitemaps).”
Is There Value In Uploading All Sitemaps?
According to John Mueller, it’s enough to upload the index sitemap file. However, from our side of the Search Console, I think most people would agree that it’s better not to leave it to chance that Google will or will not crawl a URL. For that reason, SEOs may decide it’s reassuring to go ahead and upload all sitemaps that contain the changed URLs.
The URL Inspection tool is a solid approach because it enables SEOs to request crawling for a specific URL. The downside of the tool is that you can only request this for one URL at a time. Google’s URL Inspection tool does not support bulk URL submissions for indexing.
See also: Bing Recommends lastmod Tags For AI Search Indexing
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Denis OREA
