HTML Sitemaps - a source of useful information or a ranking threat?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Back in October of 2009 Matt Cutts announced in a youtube video that if you could only choose one of either a standard xml sitemap or an on site html sitemap you should choose the HTML sitemap.

Fast forward to today, does the advice still hold true? A concern would be that a sitemap reachable from a link ON your site may be seen as keyword stuffing or creating links for the purpose of affecting search rankings.

Do you have an HTML sitemap and if so would you recommend it or do you feel it might be a source of concern, especially post-panda update?

Please mention size of sitemap if you reference one, aka 500 links or 50,000 links broken up over 500 pages of 100 links each, etc.

[tedster]

I would never build a 50,000 link html sitemap, because I consider them to be important for human users. For that reason, I "boil it down" to help the user get the big picture of the site structure.

I used to feel html sitemaps were useful, and to a degree they are. However, what matters most is a well thought out internal linking structure. If you've got that, then the sitemap pretty much mirrors the same structure.