Site with many pages

How many pages in sitemap?

[zaneta]

I am not reffering to Google's Sitemap, but to the sitemap of the site itself. If the site contains many pages how should the sitemap be like? Do i put 3000 links showing to the pages of the site or create sitemap-1.asp and sitemap-2.asp putting 1500 links in each page? Another idea would be not to have each and every page of your site in the sitemap, but have links only to the main categories.

thank you
Z

[SEOPTI]

If you have a strong backlink profile, don't use a sitemap, it often just causes trouble.

[zaneta]

I would like to use a sitemap, i already have one in the site. But the size of the site increased, as we added many new pages during the summer. So i would like to hear an opinion abt the sitemap's structure.

Any ideas accepted!
Thank you.

[JS_Harris]

An idea, don't go with a sitemap. There is no way that a sitemap page with 1500 links on it has enough pagerank to pass along to all of them.

A better idea is to take the absolute best 10 pages and link to them from the main page. Then from each page or article link to 5 or 10 "similar articles". That way you have a more user friendly way of navigating the site and the pages can handle the pagerank issues.

Your category pages should have a manageable amount of links per page and use a proper nav bar that links the pages together so that you can jump from page one to any other page in one click idealy, in less than three absolutely. You often see this as "<< 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... 25 >>" at the bottom. "previous / next" is not good enough for a large site.