Xml sitemap advice for website with over 100,000 articles

[jarrett.mackay]

Hi,

I have read numerous articles that support submitting multiple XML sitemaps for websites that have thousands of articles... in our case we have over 100,000.  So, I was thinking I should submit one sitemap for each news category.

My question is how many page levels should each sitemap instruct the spiders to go?  Would it not be enough to just submit the top level URL for each category and then let the spiders follow the rest of the links organically?

So, if I have 12 categories the total number of URL´s will be 12???

If this is true, how do you suggest handling or home page, where the latest articles are displayed regardless of their category... so I.E. the spiders will find l links to a given article both on the home page and in the category it belongs to.  We are using canonical tags.

Thanks,

Jarrett

[AlanBleiweiss]

It's really a process of experimenting over time to find out the method that results in the most URLs indexed that in turn brings the most relevant traffic.  Personally I wouldn't have one for each category, yet without tests there's no conclusive reasoning either way.

[jarrett.mackay]

Thanks for the tip... I will do that.

I´m still unsure if I really need to submit a sitemap with thousands of URL´s  I was thinking I should create an sitemap index file the points to individual top level category sitemaps and leave it at that. If I do this though, I suppose I don´t need individual sitemaps per category as I will just insert the category URL´s in the root sitemap.  What do you think?

[AlanBleiweiss]

To add to Corey's response, I'll repeat what I just provided another question here on Pro Q&A.  Sitemap.xml files can handle a maximum of 50,000 URLs, however I've seen them choke with as few as 10,000.  Its important to run them through a tool like tools.pingdom.com to ensure they load within just a couple seconds.

Then submit them through Google/Bing webmaster systems and then see if they succeed in crawling all of them.

[CoreyTisdale]

We break up our sitemap files into several different site maps, and then use a sitemap index file to make sure Google finds them all.

At the bottom of this post they talk about using an index file to combine multiple sitemaps, and they also specifically say it is fine to have one time sensitive site map (ie: front page items) and several other less time sensitive ones (categories in your case).

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/10/multiple-sitemaps-in-same-directory.html