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        Robots.txt and Multiple Sitemaps

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        • allstatetransmission
          allstatetransmission last edited by

          Hello,

          I have a hopefully simple question but I wanted to ask to get a "second opinion" on what to do in this situation. I am working on a clients robots.txt and we have multiple sitemaps. Using yoast I have my sitemap_index.xml and I also have a sitemap-image.xml I do put them in google and bing by hand but wanted to have it added into the robots.txt for insurance. So my question is, when having multiple sitemaps called out on a robots.txt file does it matter if one is before the other? From my reading it looks like you can have multiple sitemaps called out, but I wasn't sure the best practice when writing it up in the file.

          Example:

          User-agent: *
          
          Disallow: 
          
          Disallow: /cgi-bin/
          
          Disallow: /wp-admin/
          
          Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
          
          Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap_index.xml
          
          Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap-image.xml
          
          Thanks a ton for the feedback, I really appreciate it! :) 
          J
          
          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • allstatetransmission
            allstatetransmission @TakeshiYoung last edited by

            Awesome! yea I submitted them to bing and google by hand, I just figured it couldn't hurt to have it in my robots too.

            Appreciate the feedback 🙂

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • TakeshiYoung
              TakeshiYoung last edited by

              Yes, what you have is the proper format. The best way to submit sitemaps, of course, is to submit them via Google & Bing Webmaster Tools.

              Sitemaps won't have much impact on your site unless you have a really large site, so I wouldn't focus on them too much. The best way to get content crawled & indexed by Google is good internal link structure and authoritative external links.

              allstatetransmission 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
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