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Sitemap.xml strategy for site with thousands of pages
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I have a client that has a HUGE website with thousands of product pages. We don't currently have a sitemap.xml because it would take so much power to map the sitemap. I have thought about creating a sitemap for the key pages on the website - but didn't want to hurt the SEO on the thousands of product pages. If you have a sitemap.xml that only has some of the pages on your site - will it negatively impact the other pages, that Google has indexed - but are not listed on the sitemap.xml.
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@jerrico1 Only including some pages in the sitemap won't hurt your SEO performance at all. I've done this on a number of sites for exactly the same reasons you are facing.
The XML sitemap simply gives Google one more way to find your pages. Ideally, you could use it to give Google a way to find all of your pages but you want to at least use it for the pages you want to be sure Google finds. However, there is no penalty if the page isn't in the sitemap.
That said - you may want to check if you need the XML sitemap at all as a point of discovery. If you have lots of links (internal or external) to the pages on your website, then odds are good that Google is already finding those pages. The XML sitemap wouldn't hurt to have but if there already links to these pages, you likely don't have a big problem to solve here.
The best way to check this is within your log file - pull a unique list of all the URLs that Google has crawled over the last few weeks. You may not be able to open up your log files (sometimes you can't easily on large sites and you aren't using an enterprise log analyzer). If that is the case, then you could check to see how many of your pages are Google organic landing pages in your analytics tool--if the page is getting traffic from Google, then Google clearly found the page.
Hope that helps!
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