: What are sitemap letters? sitemap-g.xml sitemap-r.xml sitemap-b.xml I have a sitemap on my site at this location: https://www.loveelectronics.co.uk/handlers/sitemap.ashx which is referenced in my robots.txt

@Lengel546

Well, maybe it is trying to see if multiple XML sitemaps may have been created/uploaded (e.g. in the case of XML sitemaps that have been split into multiple because each hit the upper limit of max URLS per XML sitemap file)

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@Kevin317

You're probably just dealing with a relatively dumb spider.

/sitemap.xml is the "standard" location, which explains that request. Whatever spider/bot is hitting that location is just taking the safe bet. Hopefully, for them anyway, they're also looking at your robots file.

As for the others, they're not standard names, but most likely just something the spider encountered on another site and stashed for future attempts, eg. Lyricspedia's sitemap index which has some of those same filenames, minus the .gz. It's possible it was just programmed with a few such patterns, since this one specifically seems kind of likely.

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