No, don’t redirect your sitemap.xml – You have to just kill it off. Remove it from Google Webmaster tools and delete it from your domain folder, and submit the new map in WMT.
I think that using sitemap_index.xml and the his multi-file sitemap_structure was a mistake, but there’s nothing we can do about it.
It’s one of the biggest issues I have with this (great) plugin is that most people won’t realize that their old sitemap.xml file will no longer remain current.
I too would have preferred that he used the normal naming convention, but for a massively large site, his way is certainly better.
I just read this and deleted my sitemap.xml files on my sites and went into the yoast xml and generated new multiple xml files. How do you get Google to look for the sitemap locations I have now? Thank you
I just checked… actually, the plugin author is also redirecting his sitemap.xml to sitemap_index.xml… Check this : http://yoast.com/sitemap.xml
Scott is right, but I still redirect any requests for “sitemap.xml” to “sitemap_index.xml” 🙂
How do you redirect the sitemap.xml to sitemap_index.xml?
Put this in your .htaccess file:
# courtesy of http://gentoovps.net/redirect-sitemap-xml/
RewriteRule ^sitemap\.xml http://www.yourwebsiteurl.com/sitemap_index.xml [L,R=301]
I believe you could also use a redirect plugin.
