'Can <sitemapindex> contain both <url> and <sitemap> items?

Can I put both <url> and <sitemap> index inside my <sitemapindex>? I have a site example.com and my main sitemap stores here example.com/sitemap.xml and contains following:

<sitemapindex>
    <url>
        <loc>example.com/catalog</loc>
    </url>
    <sitemap>
        <loc>ny.example.com/sitemap.xml</loc>
    </sitemap>
    <sitemap>
        <loc>la.example.com/sitemap.xml</loc>
    </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

So I have a few <url> (which are pages) and a lot of <sitemap> elements (which are sitemapindexes too).

How to organize that structure?

sitemap


Solution 1:[1]

No you can't, because sitemapindex documents can only reference sitemap documents.

See here for more info: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#index

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1

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