Should our social network put all of our member profiles in the site map?
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We're working on some changes to our site and want to add a site map file to give some hints to search engines on our member profiles. Our site has millions of member profiles. I want to ensure that Google indexes them.
Is there a benefit to submitting millions of profiles across multiple site maps?
Is it better to pick a sample of those and submit them? Most member profiles have links to other member profiles.
Is there any benefit to taking a single site map of 50k links and then changing it at some frequency so that all of the member profiles are eventually indexed?
Thanks.
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This was the approach we were considering. However, what gave me pause was looking at other social networks are doing.
- LinkedIn only has 50k profiles.
- Meez has multiple index files and looks like they are indexing many of their profiles
- Facebook and MySpace don't appear to use Sitemaps (although they do have a crawlable member directory)
- WeeWorld has 500 links
The point is there doesn't seem to be any consistency.
If we end up creating a human readable directory ala Facebook does that achieve the same thing?
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Totally agree with mike and john.
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I would definitely do this. Since you have so many profiles, you'll want to have one main sitemaps linking to smaller sitemaps with the profile URLs. One of the sites I work on has several million activities created by users that we put into sitemaps. We automatically generate our sitemaps files frequently and add the new activities created. We include a last modified date for each activity as well so the search bot will know if anything has changed since the last time it's indexed it.
I would create a sitemap system where all of your profiles could be found, and by including the last modified date, you can leave it up to the searchbot as to whether or not a profile has been updated and needs to be re-indexed. There are a couple other properties you could use listed on http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php as well.
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Yes, we have the concept of public / private profiles. Private profiles aren't included in the index.
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Benefiting or not, make sure users have the ability to turn this off to avoid privacy problems.
It might create a mess though if they link back and forth.
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