Sitemap Use and Placement?

My store resides a level down from the root of my website …



http://www.qualitypromosplus.com is the website …



http://www.qualitypromosplus.com/store is the store …



Recently, I deleted my sitemap.xml in the root of the site and started using the CSCart Google Site Map Addon.



The addon appears to be working and if I go to http://www.qualitypromosplus.com/store/sitemap.xml I see it and it is current.



I am currently pointing to that sitemap in my robots.txt



Here are my questions …


  1. Does having pages at root of the site above /store/ negatively impact SEO on my store pages
  2. My top level site pages are no longer part of my sitemap because Google Site Map only works from /store/ as the root. Can you have multiple sitemaps … like a sitemap at the root that includes a link to the sitemap at the /store/ level. Or, can you have multiple sitemaps listed in robots.txt?



    I guess at the end of the day it get down to the question … does the store need to be at the website root to achieve optimal SEO?

Hello, I'll try to answer your questions.


  1. I believe that your site at the root directory shouldn't have any bad SEO impact on your store.
  2. You can specify several sitemap.xml files in one robots.txt file. Please see more information here. I also can you offer to specify several sitemap.xml files in Webmasters tool.

This answers my question. Thank you for your reply!