Modify placement of sitemaps for multilang site

support
1

I’d like to modify the default placement of sitemaps. The docs say:

With a multilingual project, Hugo generates:

  • A sitemap.xml file in the root of each site (language) using the built-in sitemap.xml template
  • A sitemap.xml file in the root of the publishDir using the built-in sitemapindex.xml template

However I’d like to change this so it’s instead (differences bolded):

  • A sitemap.xml file in the root of each site (language), except for the default language, using the built-in sitemap.xml template
  • A sitemap.xml file in the root of the publishDir using the built-in sitemap.xml template for the default lang
  • A sitemap_index.xml file in the root of the publishDir using the built-in sitemapindex.xml template which outputs all language sitemaps.

Resulting structure would be:

https://example.com/sitemap.xml = contains only English language URLs on the main domain. This does not need to include the other languages.
https://example.com/es/sitemap.xml = contains all Spanish language URLs
https://example.com/ja/sitemap.xml = etc.
https://example.com/zh/sitemap.xml = etc.
https://example.com/ko/sitemap.xml
https://example.com/de/sitemap.xml
https://example.com/fr/sitemap.xml
https://example.com/es/sitemap.xml
https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml = references all of the XML sitemaps above

Is there a way of doing this without disabling the default sitemaps, and creating a custom output type with corresponding content files?

2

In your site configuration, what is the value of defaultContentLanguageInSubdir? It defaults to false.

3

It’s false as it’s not explicitly set in my config.

4

I cannot come up with a way to do as you ask.

5

I cannot come up with a way to do as you ask.

Hopefully not because of my poor placement of “the” in the sentence you quoted. :laughing:

Yeah, I suspected that there may not be a way.

Next best thing:

With the custom sitemap route, creating a custom output type and creating a section for sitemaps in the content folder, is there a way for it to automatically generate a page for every language without manually creating a sitemap.{lang}.xml file for each language?

6

Regardless of approach, this seems like a lot of work. What happens if you do nothing? Can you use server-side redirects instead?

Edit: you can’t use a redirect for the sitemap_index because it would have the wrong path to the en version.

7

It may be that doing nothing is fine. Fact finding at the moment based on the requested structure from our SEO consultant.

8

This sounds like the better option.

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