Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Upgrade old sitemap to a new sitemap index. How to do without danger ?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Upgrade old sitemap to a new sitemap index. How to do without danger ?

    Technical SEO
    2
    3
    1422
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • ClaudioHeilborn
      ClaudioHeilborn last edited by

      Hi MOZ users and friends.

      I have a website that have a php template developed by ourselves, and a wordpress blog in /blog/ subdirectory. Actually we have a sitemap.xml file in the root domain where are all the subsections and blog's posts. We upgrade manually the sitemap, once a month, adding the new posts created in the blog.

      I want to automate this process , so i created a sitemap index with two sitemaps inside it. One is the old sitemap without the blog's posts and a new one created with "Google XML Sitemap" wordpress plugin, inside the /blog/ subdirectory.

      That is, in the sitemap_index.xml file i have:

      • Domain.com/sitemap.xml (old sitemap after remove blog posts urls)

      • Domain.com/blog/sitemap.xml (auto-updatable sitemap create with Google XML plugin)

      Now i have to submit this sitemap index to Google Search Console, but i want to be completely sure about how to do this.

      I think that the only that i have to do is delete the old sitemap on Search Console and upload the new sitemap index, is it ok ?

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

        Hi Patrick thanks for your prompt reply, I consider that´s the best option.

        Thanks for your advice!

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

          Hi there

          If you are combining sitemap indexes under one main sitemap index, then you'd simply just upload your new sitemap index to Search Console. Google will recognize, if implemented correctly, that there are other sitemaps under that main index and crawl accordingly.

          Does this answer your question? Let me know - thanks!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          Browse Questions

          Explore more categories

          • Moz Tools

            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

          • SEO Tactics

            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

          • Community

            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

          • Digital Marketing

            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

          • Research & Trends

            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

          • Support

            Connect on product support and feature requests.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • AtuliSulava

            Page Indexing without content

            indexing seo

            Hello. I have a problem of page indexing without content. I have website in 3 different languages and 2 of the pages are indexing just fine, but one language page (the most important one) is indexing without content. When searching using site: page comes up, but when searching unique keywords for which I should rank 100% nothing comes up. This page was indexing just fine and the problem arose couple of days ago after google update finished. Looking further, the problem is language related and every page in the given language that is newly indexed has this problem, while pages that were last crawled around one week ago are just fine. Has anyone ran into this type of problem?

            Technical SEO | | AtuliSulava
            1
          • usDragons

            Spammers created bad links to old hacked domain, now redirected to our new domain. Advice?

            My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links. Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there. The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com". 😞 Thanks in advance for any assistance!

            Technical SEO | | usDragons
            0
          • One2OneDigital

            My old URL's are still indexing when I have redirected all of them, why is this happening?

            I have built a new website and have redirected all my old URL's to their new ones but for some reason Google is still indexing the old URL's. Also, the page authority for all of my pages has dropped to 1 (apart from the homepage) but before they were between 12 to 15. Can anyone help me with this?

            Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital
            0
          • CharmingGuy

            How to block text on a page to be indexed?

            I would like to block the spider indexing a block of text inside a page , however I do not want to block the whole page with, for example , a noindex tag. I have tried already with a tag like this : chocolate pudding chocolate pudding However this is not working for my case, a travel related website. thanks in advance for your support. Best regards Gianluca

            Technical SEO | | CharmingGuy
            0
          • rhoadesjohn

            How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages

            We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th.  It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?

            Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn
            0
          • PioneerServices

            Can you have a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html on the same site?

            Thanks in advance for any responses; we really appreciate the expertise of the SEOmoz community! My question: Since the file extensions are different, can a site have both a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html both siting at the root domain? For example, we've already put the html sitemap in place here: https://www.pioneermilitaryloans.com/sitemap Now, we're considering adding an XML sitemap. I know standard practice is to load it at the root (www.example.com/sitemap.xml), but am wondering if this will cause conflicts. I've been unable to find this topic addressed anywhere, or any real-life examples of sites currently doing this. What do you think?

            Technical SEO | | PioneerServices
            0
          • jackaveli

            How often should I upload a new sitemap in google webmasters?

            So I have a real estate website that is regularly changing listings, photos, data.  Every time a new listing is added it creates a page for that listing. My question is how frequently should I be recreating a new xml sitemap and uploading it to google webmasters? Thanks in advance.

            Technical SEO | | jackaveli
            0
          • UnderRugSwept

            Google is indexing my directories

            I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was looking at all of Google's results for my site and I found dozens of results for directories such as: Index of /scouting/blog/wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins Obviously I don't want those indexed. How do I prevent Google from indexing those? Also, it only seems to be doing it with Wordpress, not any of the directories on my main site. (We have a wordpress blog, which is only a portion of the site)

            Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.