Case: Splitting hot vs cold URLs sped indexing 3.4x

Case: Splitting hot vs cold URLs sped indexing 3.4x
A classifieds site mixed fresh listings and 2-year-old archive in one sitemap. New listings took ~4 days to index.
What we did:
— Split into sitemap-fresh.xml (last 30 days) and sitemap-archive.xml
— Kept fresh file small (under 5,000 URLs) for fast full reads
— Updated fresh file every 15 minutes; archive daily
Measured outcome over 5 weeks:
— Median index time for new listings: 4 days → 28 hours (3.4x faster)
— No change in archive crawl pressure
Checklist:
✅ Time-sensitive URLs isolated in a small file
✅ Fresh file under 5,000 URLs
✅ Stable URLs separated into their own file
Definition of done: new content lives in a dedicated small sitemap updated within 15 min of publish.