Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is there a suggested limit to the amount of links on a sitemap?
-
Currently, I have an error on my moz dashboard indicating there are too many links on one of my pages. That page is the sitemap. It was my understanding all internal pages should be linked to the sitemap.
Can any mozzers help clarify the best practice here?
Thanks,
Clayton
-
Your html sitemap is best for website visitors, so best practice is to list the most important sections/pages. Google can use your html sitemap page to crawl the rest of your site as long as the structure can be followed.
If you have lots of pages, then it's best to us an xml sitemap to submit through Google Webmaster. Once your xml sitemap is in the root directory of your website, you can also let search engines know its location through your robots.txt file like this:
User-agent: * Sitemap: http://www.SomeDomain.com/sitemap.xmlIf your site changes over time, it's a good idea to create fresh sitemaps - just set reminders for yourself in a calendar.
-
That makes sense. Thanks.
-
Thanks for the help BrewSEO, Darin, and Zora.
-
I believe he is referring to an actual site map html page, not an XML file to submit to Google.
-
Don't worry about it. The "too many links" message is based on Google's suggestion to have less than 100 links per-page. Obviously site-maps are going to be an exception to this rule, and with good reason. You are fine.
-
The answer is "technically" 50,000.
However, the size for sitemap matters too (no bigger than 50MB).
If you have more than these numbers allow for in Google's Guidelines then you break them up and have multiple sitemaps on your site.
Here is Google's Guidelines on Sitemaps:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183668
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Desktop & Mobile XML Sitemap Submitted But Only Desktop Sitemap Indexed On Google Search Console
Hi! The Problem We have submitted to GSC a sitemap index. Within that index there are 4 XML Sitemaps. Including one for the desktop site and one for the mobile site. The desktop sitemap has 3300 URLs, of which Google has indexed (according to GSC) 3,000 (approx). The mobile sitemap has 1,000 URLs of which Google has indexed 74 of them. The pages are crawlable, the site structure is logical. And performing a Landing Page URL search (showing only Google/Organic source/medium) on Google Analytics I can see that hundreds of those mobile URLs are being landed on. A search on mobile for a longtail keyword from a (randomly selected) page shows a result in the SERPs for the mobile page that judging by GSC has not been indexed. Could this be because we have recently added rel=alternate tags on our desktop pages (and of course corresponding canonical ones on mobile). Would Google then 'not index' rel=alternate page versions? Thanks for any input on this one. PmHmG
Technical SEO | | AlisonMills0 -
Image Sitemap
I currently use a program to create our sitemap (xml). It doesn't offer creating an mage sitemaps. Can someone suggest a program that would create an image sitemap? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Good alternatives to Xenu's Link Sleuth and AuditMyPc.com Sitemap Generator
I am working on scraping title tags from websites with 1-5 million pages. Xenu's Link Sleuth seems to be the best option for this, at this point. Sitemap Generator from AuditMyPc.com seems to be working too, but it starts handing up, when a sitemap file, the tools is working on,becomes too large. So basically, the second one looks like it wont be good for websites of this size. I know that Scrapebox can scrape title tags from list of url, but this is not needed, since this comes with both of the above mentioned tools. I know about DeepCrawl.com also, but this one is paid, and it would be very expensive with this amount of pages and websites too (5 million ulrs is $1750 per month, I could get a better deal on multiple websites, but this obvioulsy does not make sense to me, it needs to be free, more or less). Seo Spider from Screaming Frog is not good for large websites. So, in general, what is the best way to work on something like this, also time efficient. Are there any other options for this? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | blrs120 -
Should we nofollow footer social links?
Like most sites today we have a whole raft of social links in our footer, these are on every page of the site and link out to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc Should these links be nofollow to avoid juice leaving our site or would you recommend allowing them to be followed to increase the power of these social sites? Is there a definitive Yay or Na on these social links?
Technical SEO | | Twist3600 -
Should I include tags in sitemap?
Hello All, I was wondering if you should include tags and categories in your sitemap. In the past on previous blogs I have always left tags and categories out. The reason for this is a good friend of mine who has been doing SEO for a long time and inhouse always told me that this would result in duplicate content. I thought that it would be a great idea to get some input from the SEOmoz community as this obviously has a big affect on your blog and the number of pages indexed. Any help would be great. Thanks, Luke Hutchinson.
Technical SEO | | LukeHutchinson1 -
Self-referencing links
I personally think that self-referencing links are silly. It's blatantly easy for Google to tell and my instinct says that the link juice for this would simply evaporate rather than passing back to itself. Does anyone have information backing me up from an authoritative source? I can't find any info about this linked to Matt Cutts, Rand or any of those I look up to.
Technical SEO | | IPROdigital0 -
Do I need an XML sitemap?
I have an established website that ranks well in Google. However, I have just noticed that no xml sitemap has been registered in Google webmaster tools, so the likelihood is that it hasn't been registered with the other search engines. However, there is an html sitemap listed on the website. Seeing as the website is already ranking well, do I still need to generate and submit an XML sitemap? Could there be any detriment to current rankings in doing so?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
Does Yelp pass link juice?
This is probably a profoundly obvious question, but I can't seem to find an explicit answer on the internet, so I'll ask it here: Yelp's links out to local business websites are not nofollow'd, but they go through a javascript-based redirect. My understanding is that javascript redirected links do not pass link juice, so a link from a yelp profile will not directly impact my page authority; however, it looks like yelp does use nofollow judiciously for internal links, so I don't understand why they would allow follow for these "useless" outbound links. Do yelp's javascript-redirected links pass link juice?
Technical SEO | | tvkiley0