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I couldn't find much information about this topic in the official docs, but under Google's best practices:

  1. "You can host your sitemaps anywhere on your site, but a sitemap affects only descendants of the parent directory"
  2. "Google will crawl your URLs exactly as listed"

Therefore if I use the ping tool to submit a sitemap under a specific path/directory, https://example.com/my/custom/path/sitemap.xml (indexing URLs under this same path), could parent URLs/sitemaps, https://example.com/sitemap.xml, in the same domain be affected in any way?

Would be relevant to understand if Search Console submission has any difference or advantage over the ping tool to reindex/recrawl a large group of URLs.

Stephen Ostermiller
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CPHPython
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  • What do you mean by "affected"? Sitemaps have very little effect on anything at all. Using them can get Google to come crawl the pages in them, but they don't typically help with indexing and rankings. See The Sitemap Paradox – Stephen Ostermiller Mar 01 '23 at 20:41
  • It doesn't matter how you submit the sitemap. I don't see how one sitemap will affect another. What the article seems to be saying is that if the sitemap is in custompath then urls not under custompath should not be referenced in it. Why, I don't know. – Rohit Gupta Mar 02 '23 at 03:38
  • @StephenOstermiller thanks for that reference, even though it's 13y.o. it has some good info from a Google worker's answer: "we do pick up and index otherwise unlinked URLs from there too" but "We don't use Sitemap files for ranking". By affected I meant if the ping would cause an override over a previously submitted sitemap at a parent directory. From that ref it seems it's just additional info, right? – CPHPython Mar 02 '23 at 20:32
  • @RohitGupta thanks for your interpretation/view on it, and yes I see your point: other/parents paths would be disregarded even if in the same domain and presented on the pinged sitemap. – CPHPython Mar 02 '23 at 20:34

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