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  4. Robots.txt and Multiple Sitemaps

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Robots.txt and Multiple Sitemaps

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  • allstatetransmission
    allstatetransmission last edited by Feb 5, 2014, 5:41 PM

    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 Feb 5, 2014, 7:40 PM Feb 5, 2014, 7:40 PM

      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 Feb 5, 2014, 7:40 PM Feb 5, 2014, 7:33 PM

        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 Feb 5, 2014, 7:40 PM Reply Quote 3
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