Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention.
Rank Math splits the sitemap to 200 (by default) for Search Engines, like Google, to crawl them faster, and Rank Math uses the links per sitemap limit to break down sitemaps into smaller parts.
Here’s a link for more information:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/sitemaps/build-sitemap
I hope that helps.
Thank you.
Ok, so it’s not a detriment to ranking.
That said, how do we manage categories for site maps using rank math?
Simply using categories or tags? Or is there some other way?
And what is the risk if we go over 200, does it really matter?
Hello,
Rank Math automatically creates a new sitemap for your category and you can manage that in your WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > Sitemap Settings. This applies to your tags as well.
As for the links per sitemap, you can go over 200 as long as it doesn’t slow down when the search engine loads that sitemap.
If you have thousands of posts, let’s say 100,000. You can set the links per sitemap to 1,000, and Rank Math will create 100 subsets of sitemaps and Google will still be able to crawl these sitemaps.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hello,
We are glad we could address your concern. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.
If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.
If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.
Thank you.
