Sitemap page question.

[frobn]

Google suggests that you use under 100 links per page. How do you handle sitemap pages when you have more than one hundred links? My thought would be to add additonal sitemap pages but things are not always logical.

[HHI Golf Guy]

Since site maps are a good launching point for SE spiders to find content, many people put a link to every single page on their site map or create multiple site map pages.

A good site map should be designed with your site visitors in mind. Now ask yourself, "If I was visiting a web site and needed to access their site map, would I take the time to read through hundreds of links over multiple pages?" If you answered "Yes" you're in the extreme minority. The longer it takes someone to find information on your site, the greater chance they will move on to one of your competitors web sites.

Most web surfers want good information and they want it fast. Keep that in mind when you design your site map. Your site map should be topic driven, not page driven. Yes, you can link specific pages, but use more topics than pages.

For example, instead of linking to every single article from your site map, link to pages that cover different article comments (i.e. a table of contents (TOC) page). If you're TOC page is divided into sections (i.e. Blue Widget Articles and Red Widget Articles) use a link and a bookmark.

You may have to add some pages to your web site to accomplish the task of grouping similar information. That's OK. In fact, it gives you a chance to add more internal links with optimized anchor text to your web site. Oh yeah - update the main navigation structure of your site (if needed) to accomodate this new site structure.

I do have one caveat to these guidelines. When I first load a site, I do include more links than usual on my site map page. This is because new web sites are not spidered as frequently as mature web sites, and hopefully the spider picks up the site map as one of the first pages it indexes. Once the site has most of its pages indexed, I cut back on my site map.

Also, when a site is new, I usually don't have to worry about too many visitors to the site, so I feel safe in breaking my design rule.

Bottom line - make it easy for the user to quickly scan and find topics of interest. I also include a search box at the top of my site map pages.

[frobn]

Hi HHI

Thank you for your very locagical explanation. That is the route I am going to take.

[HHI Golf Guy]

You're welcome!