I have created a complete sitemap for a big website. To keep track of the pages I have split them into multiple sitemaps, depending on the categories. And created a "sitemap index" file that contains all of them.
However, some URLs are available in multiple sitemaps. Should this be a problem for Bing or Google when submitting them? Or is it OK to have the same URL located in multiple submitted sitemaps?
Thank you.
If you're talking about images, then image URL will end with their extension like example.com/uploads/my-file.jpg, so it is not consider as duplicate URL.
And don't believe on moz, their most of analysis are depends on their assumption, and URL mention by Analog is same. Sitemap used for crawling purpose, so how it can be manipulated for any purpose?
Even Google suggest to submit our website RSS feed to webmaster tools, and it contains same recent URL with different markup. And Google like it if you submit both. Overall sitemap is used for indexing purpose, submitting same sitemap twice, will not make you on trouble :)
According to a blog post on MOZ about multiple sitemaps:
It is still just one URL, but the engines prefer to not have URLs duplicated across sitemaps.
In this way, you are sending a lower quality signal about your sitemaps. Certainly this can happen, like any duplication, but if it is rampant, hundreds-thousands of URLs duplicated across multiple sitemaps might lead the engines to believe that your are trying to manipulate them in some way and I wouldn't be surprised if they trusted the sitemaps less, which may defeat the purpose of having them in the first place.
