Sitemaps

What does Google think of them?

[yevlesh]

How does google view site maps. Does it crawl them, and if so, does it penalize sites for it.

I have a very large number of pages, many deep into the site and I was considering using a sitemap to help them get indexed by SE spiders.

Eugene

[jaytierney]

I'm sure Google doesn't punish a site for having a sitemap - that would be crazy. All you're doing is offering your visitors a helpful guide for getting around, so it's definitely a good thing. That's my take anyway...

[luma]

What's good for your customer is good for Google!

How big is this very large number? I wouldn't put 27,000 links on a sitemap; not even 900. Instead I would create create one main site map with 30 links to sub or category site maps that again carry 30 links to the target pages or sub site maps.

Now, if you link from your target pages back to the category site map, you will actually enforce the theme of your site (and help your customers and Google).

I have a very small personal site with a sitemap called sitemap.html, that uses the word "Sitemap" in the title, description and first <H2>.
I link to it from all of my pages and it therefore even got a PR5 and gets reFRESHed more often. :)

Have a look at Nielsen's article on Site Map Usability [useit.com] and use the WebmasterWorld's site search [searchengineworld.com] to search for "sitemap" and "site map"