On 12th June, Bing announced support for the following Sitemap enhancements:
1) Webmasters can now include up to 50,000 references (either URLs or links to child Sitemaps) in your sitemap.xml index file. Until recently, Sitemap files only supported about 1,000 child references.
This enhancement will be very useful to extremely large sites, as now a single, large Sitemap index file, referencing up to 50,000 child Sitemap files, each of which referencing up to 50,000 URLs, can reference up to a total of 2.5 billion URLs.
2) A slight modification of the Sitemaps XSD schemas helps developers and applications to validate Sitemaps content against defined types. For example, the attribute lastmod is now xsd:date instead of xsd:string. We aim to improve Sitemaps quality with this modification. Note that the Sitemap schema version is still identified as version 0.9.
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