Split Sitemaps By Content Type vs By Date: Optimize For Diagnosis

Split Sitemaps By Content Type vs By Date: Optimize For Diagnosis

Both keep child files under 50k. They differ in what they let you debug.

Split by content type (/products, /blog, /categories) when:
— You want GSC's per-file indexed counts to map to a section you can act on.
— Different sections have different indexing health.

Split by date (2024-q1, 2024-q2) when:
— News/large archives where freshness varies by age.
— You want to confirm new cohorts get indexed before old ones decay.

Do NOT split by arbitrary ID ranges (1-50000, 50001-100000):
— A drop in "sitemap_3" tells you nothing actionable.

Pass/fail:
— ✅ Each child file name describes its contents.
— ✅ You can answer "which section is under-indexed?" from GSC alone.

Definition of done: the split structure doubles as a coverage dashboard.