Dealing with Sitemap cross-submissions

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Since the
launch of Sitemaps,
webmasters have been asking if they could submit their Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single
dedicated host. A fair question—and now you can!

Why would someone want to do this? Let’s say that you own www.example.com and mysite.google.com
and you have Sitemaps for both hosts, for example, sitemap-example.xml and sitemap-mysite.xml.
Until today, you would have to store each Sitemap on its respective host. If you tried to place
sitemap-mysite.xml on www.example.com, you would
get an error
because, for security reasons, a Sitemap on www.example.com can only contains URLs from
www.example.com. So how do we solve this? Well, if you can “prove” that you own or control both
of these hosts, then either one can host a Sitemap containing URLs for the other. Just follow the
normal
verification process
in
Google Webmaster Tools
and any verified site in your account will be able to host Sitemaps for any other verified site
in the same account.

Here is an example showing both sites verified:

And now, from a single host, you can submit Sitemaps for both sites without any errors.
sitemap-example.xml contains URLs from www.example.com and sitemap-mysite.xml
contains URLs from mysite.google.com but both now reside on www.example.com:

We’ve also added more information on
handling cross-submits in our
Webmaster Help Center.

For those of you wondering how this affects the other search engines that support the Sitemap
Protocol, rest assured that we’re talking to them about how to make cross-submissions work
seamlessly across all of them. Until then, this specific solution will work only for users of
Google Webmaster Tools.

Posted by Mickey Kataria, Google Zürich