Oh God, what do I do for a site map?

I have been building web sites for 17 years. I have never ever built a site map.

So now I have this thing about building a site map. I feel I should do one for my London Maps site. Now, google is good and generous to me and it indexes each and every one of the pages within a week of them going up - I get good search engine traffic down to the most obscure and buried pages.

But this is a complex site, with between 3-4,000 pages of information, and I guess some users would like a site map to find their way about.

But ... do I create a sitemap to each and every one of those pages? I.e. a single site map page with 3,000 plus links on it? Or do I create a site map to the major sub pages ...?

I'm not too sure how to go about this - even some of the sub pages (if I go that route) will have 500 plus links on them.

So my question, from a complete site map newbie is, do I have one page with every single link on it, or do I have site maps within site maps? One major site map page leading to sub-site map pages?

Should I just give up on the idea anyway?

And is this even in the right forum? Now I am totally confused.

 

there are plenty of sitemap generator tools on the net. You can even try using Google's. No need to do it by hand!

 

aye generate an xml sitemap and submit to google, much easier

 

What many people do for large sites is create multiple sitemap files, using different topics to seperate each. Get your page template, and then run some server side scripts to get each and every page in your site and put them on the right page. While you are doing it, get information about the pages, like lastmod and priority, create some google sitemap files and you're done. Sitemaps are great for 404 pages and boosting your popularity with search engines.

 

3-4000 pages isn't really a large site as such. OK, it is large, but not huge! Sitemap generators based on crawling should have no troubles doing that. For HTML sitemaps, 3000-4000 links are too much in my opinion. Better to separate them for sub-directories.

 

Site map generator Free , work really well and easy to use

http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

and submit to google



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I have been hiding too long - thanks for the replies and info folks!