Site map

[kathycentury21]

Hey guys,
What is the maximum number of links u can have on your site map..I have read...somewhere that SE will frown if you have a bunch and thus should msplit your site map up...Is this a lie?

Thanks

[TryUsOut]

Could you give a link to the source you heard this from? I don't think there is a limit to it. A sitemap would eventually facilitate the SE bots crawl on your site and wouldn't be frowned at IMO.

[amxfan]

taken from sitemaps.org

Using Sitemap index files (to group multiple sitemap files)

You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). If you would like, you may compress your Sitemap files using gzip to reduce your bandwidth requirement; however the sitemap file once uncompressed must be no larger than 10MB. If you want to list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemap files.



hope this helps

[kathycentury21]

Wish I could...cant remember.. Memeory is gone

[Azher Memon]

As per Google Webmaster Guidelines is should be up to 100 link not more than that.
Read what Google Said


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.

More quality Guideline you can find here at Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769)

[kathycentury21]

I knew I read that somewhere.... So I should split 258 pages...Thanks

[amxfan]

Your correct with what you stated but I thought Google changed this when they went to the 0.9 protocol from .84

protocol (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html)


Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as dictated by sitemaps.org. Sitemaps created for Google using Sitemap Protocol 0.9 are therefore compatible with other search engines that adopt the standards of sitemaps.org


This is why I posted that from sitemaps.org
I will try and confirm or deny this so I can be sure I'm given the correct answer next time.

[amxfan]

Answer from Google Groups



You are referring to two different types of sitemaps,
an HTML sitemap for people visiting your site,
and
an XML or plain text sitemap for Google and
other main search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com
The sitemap that Google webmaster guidelines
recommends to have a reasonable
number of links (not much higher than 100)
to important pages of a site is a
HTML page, an usability/accessibility feature,
for visitors to your site to see the structure of
your site and to find easily what they are looking for.
It is also crawled by Googlebot like any other indexable
HTML document.

The XML sitemap submitted via Google Webmaster Tools
and possibly also referenced in robots.txt
is a different type of sitemap, for the use
of search engines, and it can contain all the URLs
that you want indexed from a site.
This sitemap can be very large,
the upper limits are
10MB (10,485,760 bytes) in size when uncompressed and can
contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs.
Multiple sitemaps are submitted via
sitemap index files.
A Sitemap index file can include up to 1,000 Sitemaps
and must not exceed 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) uncompressed.

News sitemaps are limitied to 1000 URLs.

Does that help?

[freetraff]

As per Google Webmaster Guidelines is should be up to 100 link not more than that.

Yes, but on the same page there is another sentense that says

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

This is about the number of outgoing links allowed per page.

And the sentense which was quoted by Azher Memon

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.
... is trying to say that for better usability for your site visitors.

[kathycentury21]

Excellent info...

U are the best

Thanks