XML sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. If you have more than 50,000 pages in your web site you should use sitemap index file
Also wanted to point out that you should try to keep only unique pages and posts in your sitemap. Keep out anything that could possibly be seen as duplicate content, like category pages and such. This looks a lot cleaner to Google and they'll give better weights to the pages that count on your site and will see time on search engine result ranks.
You can have 50000 URLs in each XML sitemap file and links multiple XML sitemap files with a sitemap index file
A great question because such questions and good answers to them add much value to the forum. I would respond by saying this: If you are already using wordpress then install google xlm sitemap. I have used it and I think it is great. If you do not already have wordpress then think about installing a blog in a subdirectory and using xml sitemap to send the goog spiders over to your regular site. You can configure xml to do so. When you do this you can use "Blog & Ping" to drive traffic to your regular non-blog website which is good to do.
This is great info! I have a GoogleXML sitemap for my Wordpress site. It comes as a plug in, and has really increased my traffic! Unfortunately the plugin doesnt work on a Multisite. I am waiting for that to happen.
I'm also using xml-sitemaps.com for generating my site's sitemap and submit it on Google Webmaster Tools.
Thanks for sharing good information... Can anybody tell me about the difference between ROR and XML sitemap????
I use sitemapGenerator.jnlp, you can google it. I've managed indexing a huge python website. Took 2 days, but worked perfectly.
I did it by 32000 urls and 3 files (sitemap-1.xml and sitemap.xml and sitemap-index.xml) but google doesn't accept it in my webmaster area ! Could you please help me ?