What size Sitemap?

[Brett]

I understand that having a sitemap which links directly to individual product information pages (i.e. bypassing the navigation system) is good a good way to get pages into the Search Engines quickly.

Therefore how many links would you suggest on each page of a sitemap.

Do spiders ignore links after a certain number? or do they blacklist you as a link farm if a page contains too many internal links?

I imagine some of you with huge sites containing thousands of pages have already thought about this so thought I'd ask.

Thanks
Brett

[tigger]

if you have a large site just build more site maps one of my sites has 10 with 150 links per page, but I've seen others with 200-300 links

[Mogga]

Why not consider humans in all of this?

What would a human being think of your intended page? (Lets assume that they might land there as if by magic thorugh a search engine)

How many links do humans find confortable seeing on a page? Is indented good? How can you split it up logically?

If you need help finding a human being to test it on please just ask and we'll find one from somewhere
;-)

[tigger]

>Why not consider humans in all of this?

why?

the idea of a site map is for SE's not humans so why consider them, after all we build sites around humans first then SE's so whats the problem in building a page just for the bots?

Plus I don't see the problem in having a page full of text links after all if your looking for something on a site whats the problem in laying all the pages out so a human can just jump straight to the page, in fact on some of the large sites I've been to I look for the SM so I don't have to wade through pages of crap before I can find what I'm after