A good sitemap

How many links do you have on them?

[djgreg]

Hi all,

I just thought about creating a sitemap for my site, because it is useful for the users and it passes PR to some deep-sites.
But now I wonder how many links I should post on the sitemap. Naturally there should be a link to every site except navigation or smth. But wouldn't this violate with the google guidelines which say that about 100 links on one page is enough? Or are sitemaps treated another way?
Or do you split your sitemaps in several ones?

greg

[Marcia]

Here's how Google has theirs

By important main sections
[google.com...]

Full site map
[google.com...]

There have been some good discussions - try site map + page rank in the site search.

[peewhy]

Consider the webmaster balance; ease of navigation V Google's ideals.

[djgreg]

marcia thanks for the links. I'll try to find some useful posts.

[Mohamed_E]

Google's Webmaster Guidelines [google.com] explicitly suggests splitting the site map if it has more than 100 links:

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.

[Herenvardo]

It goes beyond google pagerank algos. It's simply that a page with a lot of links will be to heavy for the visitor. I think that a sitemap must have links to all the pages of te site (excluding, obviously, the same sitemap and some pages that contain repetitive structure: files, articles, etc). If you have too many pages, split your site in some pages. Try to do it following a hierarchy, and put among 40-60 links per page: this will look to the user complete but not "condensed".
As an alternative, you can try to offer your users a little engine that shows a list with all the accessable files found in the website.