Google & Bing increase the file size limit of Sitemaps files

Google and Bing announced jointly that they have increased the file size limit of Sitemaps files from 10MB to 50MB.

That means the uncompressed version must now be under 50MB, no longer under 10MB.

Fabrice Canel, principal program manager at Bing, said, “While most sitemaps are under this 10 MB file limit, these days, our systems occasionally encounter sitemaps exceeding this limit. … Most often this is caused when sitemap files list very long URLs or if they have attributes listing long extra URLs (as alternate language URLs, Image URLs, etc), which inflates the size of the sitemap file.”

The 50,000 URL limit per Sitemaps file has not changed; you can still only have up to 50,000 URLs in a single Sitemap file. But the file size has increased significantly.

Here is Google’s tweet about that this morning:

We've updated the Sitemaps protocol with Bing! Sitemaps & indexes can be considerably larger now. More at https://t.co/uygpuywUEh

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 30, 2016