Links that are not specified on sitemap

I have a quite large site. So I didn't specify all the links on the sitemap, rather specified all the important links. Those links contain more link to thousands more pages.
Do you think Google will index all the pages that are not specified on the sitemap?
Although Google says sitemap is supplemental to crawlers, I am not sure if having such a sitemap would really help.

 

Unless you restrict pages or directories in your robots.txt search engines will crawl your entire site, regardless of a sitemap or not. They'll find every page, trust me. As long as all your pages are some how connected via hyperlinks they will get indexed.

I'd just create a site wide sitemap of all pages, it is the best thing imo. You can view my Google SiteMap FAQ post I just did in this sub-forum, will give you link to a great sitemap generator I use.

Good Luck.

 

At the very least, include them on a separate page linked from the original sitemap. That way you can ensure they are *all* easily found.

 

Thanks guys.

 

I think it is very important to have all links in the site map. This way there is not question if Google is indexing the page.

 

Sitemaps get indexed quicker than natural bot website navigation - I'd put all the links in the sitemap - with the most crucial links at the top end of the file. I had a website containing about 10K+ pages - without a sitemap, google picked up about 400 pages during the course of about 4 months - when I loaded the sitemap - google picked up 8000 pages within 3 months. Big difference in indexing speed - and so this is really the importanc of sitemaps - google ability to index your site quicker.

 

Thanks for the tip about putting the most crucial links at the top. Think I'll start doing that with new pages, because I've got a strong suspicious that my regular sitemap doesn't get visited as often as usual since I added the google sitemap and they didn't seem to be picking up the new pages which were being added to the bottom of the list.

 

Another question. Does Google and Yahoo uses same sitemap format? I am using a basic XML format.

 

They do if you follow the protocol specified at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php