Internal Links on own Map page

[flanok]

Hi again,
On my sites I have set up a map page so all my pages can be found by the search engines. But now I have up to 100 links to internal pages on my map page.
As search engines do not like pages full of links, is my map page actually doing me a dis-service, rather than helping me?

Thanks
Mark

[cz]

Hi there falanok!


Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

I got this out of Google's guidelines here http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

It must be ok - everyone's got them - almost

[jawn_tech]

Great question and great follow-up response.

Like the Google page explained in the link -- I would also stress the importance of breaking up the links into categories and putting them on different pages, for a couple reasons (after they grow to become such a high number). It helps with user navigation, so they can refer to your sitemap for a page they may have forgotten to bookmark, but wanted to return to at a different time. Better than swimming through a sea of links, categorizing them helps the user.

But from a spidering perspective, it also helps the webmaster keep track of any sitemap links that lead to a page that may have changed URL's / filenames. Basically helps the webmaster to minimize the chance of overlooking broken links on a big link page.