Big site SEO: To maintain html sitemaps, or scrap them in the era of xml?
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We have dynamically updated xml sitemaps which we feed to Google et al.
Our xml sitemap is updated constantly, and takes minimal hands on management to maintain.
However we still have an html version (which we link to from our homepage), a legacy from back in the pre-xml days. As this html version is static we're finding it contains a lot of broken links and is not of much use to anyone.
So my question is this - does Google (or any other search engine) still need both, or are xml sitemaps enough?
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From an SE point of view XML sitemaps are enough, if you have a large site you may want to consider having more than one sitemap for different categories.
As Kieron suggested HTML Sitemaps are useful for people to navigate your site it might be worthwhile writing some PHP to convert the XML into HTML and making your HTML Sitemap a little more dynamic?
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Although users might not go to the sitemap very often, it is usually a very easy way to make sure some linkjuice is passed to all pages. Especially if the sitemap is linked to from a lot of pages, it usually has quite some juice to pass on. However, the sitemap should never be the only way you link to deeper pages.
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The html sitemap should not be there for Google or Bing but for real people. If no one is using the html site map and it’s causing lots of problems to maintaining it, then drop it.
But if visitors are using it, look to get it replaced with a dynamics generated html sitemap, which helps the visitors find what they are looking for. You may wish to consider using similar to amazon’s “Shop all departments” page, which allows visitors to drill into the categories.
Hope this helps.
K
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