Google and Bing Sitemap File Size Limit increased from 10MB to 50MB

Google and Bing Sitemap

Google and Bing sitemap file size has been increased from 10mb to 50mb now. One can upload the uncompressed version of sitemaps unto 50mb.

What is a Sitemap though?

Just as a traditional geographical map helps you find the place you are looking for in the world similarly is the workings of a sitemap. A bing sitemap is a model containing a list of the websites that are designed to help both users and search engines navigate the site easily. It contains website URLs for Crawlers or search engine robots. It is a way of simplifying the process for Webmasters like Google and Bing and many others. The sitemaps are in two types of format the HTML format and the XML format. Below are the examples for your better understanding.

An XML sitemap version takes the help of Crawlers to gully understand the site’s content.  The Crawlers then bring the relevant content for your query that you searched in the first place. Whereas an HTML version of the sitemap is user-friendly and a quicker way of getting where you want to in a site as it displays the proper architecture of the sitemap.

Google was the first one who introduced the Sitemaps to get where you wanted easily with the help of the web Crawlers and Bing, Yahoo, Microsoft and other search engines followed suit.

The sitemap is one of the most powerful Searches Engine Optimization tools to enhance your visibility in the digital space. It communicates with the search engines where the .txt file gives a command to the pages to be indexed and which ones to be excluded. Thus it becomes vital to include the sitemaps as it’s the most effective to optimize your search engine.

But search engines quite often face the issue of fitting the long URLs or adding the extras of the website under 10MB. Generally, this happens when long URLs contain alternate language URLs, the image containing URLs, etc. Thus Google and other search engines exceeded the limit from 10MB to 50MB. But only the file size of the URLs can be exceeded and not the number of URLs. The limit of the number of URLs is 50,000 only, but the file size can be increased.

Microsoft said- “most sitemaps are under this 10 MB file limit, these days, our systems occasionally encounter sitemaps exceeding this limit.”

A design of a sitemap is organized in a hierarchy, simplifying the contents of the large website and easy to reach the desired subject page. It is also more of a trial and error thing, but if want to be sure and not waste time you need to look up an external model of sources.

Benefits of a Sitemap

Having both the versions of Sitemaps the HTML and the XML version is the best way to improve visibility on your site. You can achieve higher ranks on the search engine. Plus it saves a lot of time of the users to just get to the specific page on the website which they want.  As it takes help of the SEO, its easy to get your site discovered by the maximum number of users by including the correct and relevant keywords in your website content. It is totally free of cost to upload your sitemaps on the desired search engine. As it is a powerful SEO tool, it helps to track your visitor’s behavior on your website by knowing the source where the traffic is coming to their site, keyword searches and thus fixing the errors faced by the visitors in order to turn them into loyal users. It categorizes the website content step by step and thus giving a clear idea about the site.

Site mapping Products

Popular site mapping products include The Brain’s Site Brain, Insight Software’s Tree Studio, IBM’s Java-based Mappuccino, and Dynamic Diagram’s eponymous product. Sitemaps can also be created using more general Web site management tools, such as Visual Web, or Microsoft’s Site Analyst.

Important Tip!!!

Make sure even if search engines allow 50MB file sized URLs, smaller sitemaps can prevent your server from getting overloaded and it might end up putting unnecessary strain on the server.


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