Most of you should be aware of what an sitemap index file does. It just lists out the list of all the sitemaps for a particular website. This sitemap index file had a Google limit of 1000 links. Anyone who exceeds this index limit would get a warning in your Google Webmaster account that, “The list of Sitemaps in your Sitemap index exceeds the maximum allowed. A Sitemap index can contain no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Split your Sitemap index into multiple Sitemap index files and ensure that each contains no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Then, resubmit your Sitemap index files individually.”
It now appears that Google has increased this limit of 1,000 sitemap files to 50,000 sitemap files. This is a substantial increase in Google’s indexing capacity. Now, webmasters would be able to submit 2.5 billion URLs to Google to crawl. Isn’t that amazing?