I am considering if having a link to all my category pages on every single page of my website is good or bad for seo, as I have over 400 internal categories? I know it is good to have internal links, but having this many on every page, I am not sure? Your ideas and thoughts would be great!
Google recommend that you only have ~100 links on a page. Most content management systems use a "category" / "subcategory" structure to get around this. Although we have ~112 on our home page, we use dropdown CSS menus to "hide" the links but the addtional amount of code to do this makes the pages less competitive. I would pick the top 50, SEO the links to the max and implement the 'subcategory' concept. But remember Google will rarely give Page Rank to a page that is 4 levels deep. Unless you are one to the big guys.
I wouldn't do it. Instead build a hierarchy where your most important categories are linked to from the home page. Then do pick the next most important pages from the first level category pages. Then try to get the rest linked from the 2nd level (so all the important pages are within 3 clicks from the home page). This will build strength to all 400 category pages but not look spammy to the search engines.
Q: How big can my Sitemap be? Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) in length when uncompressed and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. This means that if your site contains more than 50,000 URLs or your Sitemap is bigger than 10MB, you must create multiple Sitemap files and use a Sitemap index file. You should use a Sitemap index file even if you have a small site but plan on growing beyond 50,000 URLs or a file size of 10MB. Read
site maps are a great way for google bots to get around your website. Google bots should be able to get to any link on your site from another link
thanks guys, I am not sure how this has missed me for so long. AS my site has become cigger with more category my site has become less competitive. I will pick the top few categories and then put the rest on a different category page.