Views on sitemap.html

[dave_finlayson]

Just about finished our v8 redesign and have one final question for whoever has an opinion!

We currently submit a xml sitemap to Google and Yahoo. All our links are static and each page has a link to every main section on the site so the site should be easily spiderable by the search engines, and we currently seem to do very well with them.

However, our Actinic generated sitemap currently includes about 1500 sections (1 section per product) and weighs in at 192kb of html alone (none of our other pages are above 20kb) If I reduce the sitemap to main sections only (about 60 in total) it reduces it to about 31kb.

So, the big question. Do I reduce the sitemap to main sections only, happy in the knowledge (hopefully) that the site should be spidered just as well as it currently is, or do I live with a huge and frankly unusable sitemap?

[jont]

I would leave it as it is - your human vistors will appreciate the additional links and as it is a unique page (the user will have requested to view it) 192kb is not overly massive compared to the majority of websites people sit and wait for. You will also provide another bite of the cake for the spiders should the XML pages get mangled.

[dave_finlayson]

Thanks for that jont.

I am looking at formatting it slightly differently at the mo. If I can get it in some sort of understandable state, I think I will just leave it as is. To be fair, I don't think it has caused any problems as yet and it has been that size for about 3 years!

[NormanRouxel]

As Jont says, it won't hurt. Also the Site Map contains a lot of repeated text. Modems are able to do quite good compression of such text so the impact won't be as bad as you fear even for for those still on dial-up.