Sitemaps: HTML and/or XML?
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Can someone explain sitemaps, and if you need html and/or xml?
I have a site with a few html sitemaps, one for products, one for categories. I have another site with just one xml sitemap for my entire site (which has massive pages, 600k+).
Should I be dividing the site with massive pages into html sitemaps like my other site?
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If you have got a large website with 100's or 1000's of pages then you can prioritise which pages Google should see first in your XML sitemap. Your HTML should sit in the footer of your website and is important to have because it should increase the speed at which Google sees all your pages on the website. I always recommend having both XML and HTML
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You mention XML sitemaps. They need to have less than 50K links in each sitemap and less than 50MB in size.
What you do is setup your main XML sitemap and then have it contain all the URLs to your sitemaps with up to 50K urls each. BFYO has a great article on this http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/optimize-your-sitemap-index
Main support doc on sitemaps
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en&ref_topic=8476
Reference for Index sitemap
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/71453
as Moosa mentioned, the XML really helps Google find all your important links and crawl the site. You need to have one setup and submit to Google Webmaster Tools. Note that if you have an index sitemap pointing to others, you can just submit the index and Google can find the rest.
As far as an HTML sitemap, that is an HTML page that users can browse to find your pages. It also helps the bots. You can have an HTML sitemap, but I would limit it to your main pages and category pages that then can lead to all of your product pages etc. I would not bother with an extensive HTML sitemap to all products on your website when your paginated category pages do this and act as an extension of your main HTML sitemap.
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XML sitemap helps Google while crawling the site, whereas HTML sitemaps are usually used to help the visitors to have a better and easier site experience.
In my opinion having a XML sitemap is great as it will help Google while crawling and indexing the site in to search engine but there is no technical use of HTML sitemap. If you think that your visitors need one, than go for it but otherwise having XML sitemap for a website is enough!
Hope this helps!
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