Subdomain Blog Sitemap link - Add it to regular domain?

[EEE3]

Example of setup:
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com

Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com).

I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap.

1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol?

2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer.

3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap.

Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done.

Thanks!

[EEE3]

Thanks Moosa. I'll check out the link. To add, we already do use categorized sitemaps in the sitemap_index.xml structure. We have it split into several different sitemaps. No links are duplicated across those sitemaps, and we have noticed a boost in more pages being indexed since we implemented that.

My question still remains though.

If this sitemap (www.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml) has the following structure:

<sitemapindex<span class="webkit-html-attribute"> xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"</sitemapindex<span>><sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Pages_Sitemap.xml<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Carnivorous_Kittens_Sitemap.xml<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Baby_Dragons_Sitemap.xml<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Jimmy_Hoffa_Sitemap.xml Can we also add:

<loc>http://blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml</loc>

into that same location? And if we can, is there any benefit?

Thanks!

[MoosaHemani]

Ok this is new to me! But I believe xml sitemap is normally used to tell Google about the navigation of the website and what URLs are present in the website so I personally believe 1 sitemap on the main domain should work!

But adding multiple sitemap to increase indexation and traffic is also not a bad idea! I believe this post by Kate Morris will help you alot!

http://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic

hope this helps!