Store Your XML Sitemap Files on a Different Domain

The major search engines have announced an update to the sitemaps.org protocol which lets site owners store their XML Sitemap files in any location and even on a different domain than the one referenced in the Sitemap. This is good news for people who manage multiple domains and would like to keep all Sitemap files in one place, as well as for those who would like to store their Sitemap in a location other than the root.

But for doing all this you should be able to edit the robots.txt file of the domain the Sitemap file references.

Earlier, the Sitemap file had to be stored at the same location as the URLs listed in that Sitemap. For example:
http://www.abc.com/sitemap.xml could include:
www.abc.com
www.abc.com/folder1/page1.html
www.abc.com/folder2.page1.html

But it could not include:
subdomain1.abc.com
www.abcd.com

Similarly, http://www.abc.com/folder1/sitemap.xml could include:
www.abc/folder1/page1.html
www.abc.com/folder1/images/page2.html

And could not include:
www.abc.com
www.abc.com/folder2/page1.html

The earlier protocol required that whoever could modify the Sitemap file also had ownership rights of the URLs listed in the Sitemap. However, this setup proved to be problematic for some sites, including those with multiple domains and sub domains who found it difficult to write Sitemap files to multiple locations. Some sites also found it technically different to write Sitemap files to the root of the domain.

With the latest sitemaps.org update:

• Each Sitemap file can reference only one domain.
• The Sitemap can be placed anywhere (on a different domain or in a subfolder) as long as its location is referenced in the domain's robots.txt file.

Referencing the Sitemap File In robots.txt
If you have a Sitemap file for www.abc.com and you want to store it at www.abcd.com/sitemap.xml, you need to add the following line to www.abc.com/robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://www.example1.com/sitemap.xml

This line lets the search engines know that you have ownership of www.abc.com (since you can modify the robots.txt file for it) and that the Sitemap for that domain is located at http://www.abcd.com/sitemap.xml.

If you want to store Sitemaps for multiple domains in one location, simply create a Sitemap for each domain and then modify the robots.txt for each of them to point at the Sitemap file location.

The same above technique also works if you do not want to store your Sitemap at the root. If you want to store the Sitemap at http://www.abc.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml, then simply modify the robots.txt file for www.abc.com with the following:
Sitemap: http://www.abc.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml

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