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 -
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 $1750 per month, I could get a better deal on multiple websites, but this obvioulsy does not make sense to me, it needs to be free, more or less). Seo Spider from Screaming Frog is not good for large websites. So, in general, what is the best way to work on something like this, also time efficient. Are there any other options for this? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | blrs120 -
Fake Links indexing in google
Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)
Technical SEO | | mshowells0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
What is link Schemes?
Hello Friends, Today I am reading about link schemes on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 there are a several ways how to avoid Google penalties and also talk about the low quality links. But I can't understand about "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" Is there he talked about low page rank, Alexa or something else?
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
HTML Sitemap Pagination?
Im creating an a to z type directory of internal pages within a site of mine however there are cases where there are over 500 links within the pages. I intend to use pagination (rel=next/prev) to avoid too many links on the page but am worried about indexation issues. should I be worried?"
Technical SEO | | DMGoo0 -
International Site Links In Footer
We have several international sites and we have them linked in the footer of our main .com site . Should we add "nofollow" to these links? Our concern is that Google could see these sites as a network?
Technical SEO | | EwanFisher0 -
Do web pages have to be linked to a menu?
I have a situation where people search for terms like, say 1978 one dollar bill. Even though there never was a 1978 one dollar bill. I want to make a page to capture these searches but since there wasn't such a thing as a one dollar bill I don't want it connected to the rest of my content which is reality based. Does that make sense? Anyway, my question is, can I publish pages that aren't linked to my menu structure but that will be searchable or, am I going to have to figure out a way to make these oddball pages accessible through my menu?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0