I've heard that it's best not to have more than 100 links on a page. So, what if you have thousands or even tens of thousands of pages on your site. Do you break the sitemap down into multiple pages?
If you have thousand of url than u can use more than one sitemap. You can spit 100 of url per page and make pages as per your need. Suppose u have 10000 url u have to make 100 sitemap page. And give link to next page. Give sitemap2.html page link to sitemap.html and sitemap3.html link in sitemap2.html
Yeah,check out this HTML Sitemap article which suggests max 100-200 links per page. Google etc. will most likely read more links if your sitemap page has sufficient importance, but in general it will be better to split your HTML sitemaps into more pages (sitemap generator software, e.g. A1SG, can do this for you)
Are you building a HTML or XML sitemap for your site? You should review my Google sitemap FAQ I made for DP below, it will explain how to build a XML sitemap, not a HTML sitemap tho. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=531765
Google says XML 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. Use a software like GSITE Crawler
For something like that I use a CMS which is building the sitemap and submits it to google, yahoo and ms live automatically for me everytime the site is updated or at cron time.
Of course, you will have to use more than 1 site map depends on your no. of pages in the site as well as will have to put the link for another site map means Site map_1 has link for Site map_2.
We have generated sitemaps of more than 20 Million pages. Obviously, we had to split them in a lot of smaller XML files and then we have a sitemap index file. And it works!
I need to create a sitemap for 100 million HTML pages. The site map will be in XML format. What's the best way to go about creating one?
Google Sitemaps is an special file that lists all the pages on your site, whether your content has changed, and that you have added a new page. While this is a neat feature, many sites don't need to use it. Keep in mind that Google will find your site and pages by following links. See more at http://forums.postpaidseo.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=43
Site maps will not help boost ur page rank or SERP rank. Just it helps google whether to or not to index your page. when there is an option that all your pages get indexed in google then why you wanna restrict with a sitemap? Sitemap is not worth
50,000 URLs, how large a database? If you already have such a huge amount of data, the normal operation there should be a very long time! sitemap only to help google index your article, in fact, if the site into the normal track, robots regularly visit the Web site, there is no sitemap can be!