I am looking for someone to tell me the appropriate procedure to replace all google sitemaps. I can clearly go in and delete the old ones and simply replace them, but as it can sometimes take many days to get the new sitemaps indexed, will this cause a drop off in my indexing.
Is it best to add the newer sitemaps, leave the old ones and once the new ones have been indexed, to delete the old ones, or is this bad for SEO?
Additionally, I am dealing with a directory site that has around 500K+ pages. Is it acceptable to have a sitemap index file that links to all of the individual sitemaps. The index files as well as the individual sitemaps are all gziped. Is there any problem with this setup?