Written by james | 25 January 2010
Posted in S.E.O

Somehow Google have rather shiftily increased the amount of sitemap files that can be stored under a sitemap index file from 1,000 to 50,000. Nobody ever announced this colossal expansion. The last thing Google mentioned about sitemaps was on a discussion thread on their webmasters forum, a Google employee officially posted that the limit for every sitemap index file was 1,000 sitemap files.

When you go back to this thread now, a member had been reading the official Google document for sitemap errors and found a snippet on the sitemap index files. This piece of information was: ‘The list of Sitemaps in your Sitemap index exceeds the maximum allowed. A Sitemap index can contain no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Split your Sitemap index into multiple Sitemap index files and ensure that each contains no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Then, resubmit your Sitemap index files individually.’

John Simon, the Google employee that announced the limit being 1,000, then came back to this thread to say, "Thanks for resurfacing this thread as we've improved our capacity a bit since then. The limit used to be 1,000. The Help Centre article you point to is correct. The current maximum number of Sitemaps that can be referenced in a Sitemap Index file is 50,000.”

Now at the current limits, you can include 50,000 URLs in a sitemap file, and 50,000 sitemap files to a sitemap index file, so that means you can submit a extravagantly huge 2.5 billion URLs under each sitemap index file. That’s a lot of pages. It's very surprising that there was no huge announcement over this, to be honest, great news that Google should have wanted to announce. After all, who doesn’t like spreading good news?