Sitemap - What are the recommendations on the number of links

[FreddyKgapza]

Hi,

I have a sitemap(s) which is very large(.i.e. 60000) links, is it recommended to have so many links and how come when I do a site search(site:mydomain) the number of links are less than on my site map?

[zeehj]

Sitemaps cannot (should not) contain more than 50,000 URLs: https://www.sitemaps.org/faq.html#faq_sitemap_size

I'd recommend you instead create a sitemap index to house multiple sitemap files. Keep in mind you will need to separate the URLs in them in order to represent all 60K URLs you have in your existing sitemap.

Separately, EGOL makes excellent points: sitemaps aren't the only way to get pages indexed. It's entirely possible that you do not have sufficient internal links that aid crawlers' discovery of your content: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

You may also have directives (e.g. noindex) on certain pages or in your robots.txt that prevents crawlers from crawling and indexing certain parts of your site. It may be time for a technical audit: https://www.distilled.net/technical-seo-audit-checklist/

[EGOL]

how come when I do a site search(site:mydomain) the number of links are less than on my site map?

There are many causes of poor indexing....

-- if your site does not have very many links, it is possible that Google does not crawl it deeply and completely, and might even forget many of your pages between crawls

-- poor indexing can  be caused by a poor site structure, where you have category pages that link to subcategory pages which link to deep pages.... AND, you have lots of internal and external links hitting these category pages to force crawlers deep into your site - where they must chew their way out through a lot of pages

-- also, consider your content... is it unique, substantive, not copy-pasted from other websites... with such problems, Google can choose to ignore your pages

is it recommended to have so many links

That is a lot of links.  I would consider two site maps, each with half of our pages, that will get more crawling deep into your site.