Placing Sitemaps in Robots.txt

Do I put all 3?

[jdancing]

I have a site that has three sitemap files to cover the entire site.

http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml
http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml

Is it best to just add the first one to my robots.txt or all three:

sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml
sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml

[goodroi]

why not use a sitemap index file? that would group your multiple sitemap files into one line on your robots.txt.

[karter]

I wrote a script to generate sitemaps and just realised that the sitemap index is a great solution for my script, avoids manual editing of robots.txt

Now, to see whether it really helps with indexing

[jdancing]

http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml is the index file (it lists only the sitemap*.xml files with my site urls).

So I will just add to the robots.txt:
sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Thanks