Thanks for your comment and questions. Here’s how I’d address this.

First off, I recommend having a URL only appear in one sitemap. URLs showing up in multiple sitemaps won’t hurt you per se, but it reduces your ability to understand the true indexation rate for your site. If I understand your structure correctly you might do something as follows:

/sitemap/static (this would include the home page and other static pages like the contact, about, advertising etc.)
/sitemap/categories (this would include just the category pages that sit under the home page)
/sitemap/subcategories (this would include just the subcategory pages)
/sitemap/[sub].pages (a sitemap for each set of pages under a subcategory)

The last bit allows you to look at the indexation rate for all ‘pages’, but also by subcategory. You could go a step further and layer on a [cat] dimension as well, but your number of sitemaps might get a bit out of hand.

In the end, it’s about what information you want to get out of those sitemaps. Did that help answer your question?

Say you have a site structure set up so you have the home page, then you have categories under the homepage, then you have subcategories to those categories and then a few of those subcategory pages (lets call them ‘Awesome Subcategories’) have a ton of pages below them so you want to make a sitemap for each of those Awesome Subcategory pages. Would you set up a general sitemap that captures everything up to the subcategories (including Awesome Subcategories), and then a sitemap for each of the Awesome Subcategory pages?

Would there be a danger to listing the Awesome Subcategory URL in the general sitemap and then again in its own sitemap along with it’s child URL’s? Or is this duplicate URL not an issue?

You should always use an XML sitemap.

An XML sitemap helps search engines find and crawl your content. Think of it this way, a search engine can find your site via links in the wild or via a seed site (like dmoz) or you can give it a cheat cheat on ho…

I break SEO metrics down into four major buckets.

Crawl
Are search engines crawling your site? How often? How much? Where are they crawling on your site? While Google is better than ever at finding pages, crawl efficiency is very important. Make a mis…