Site Map Question

Afternoon,

For the last 5 months I've been tracking the number of pages on one of my sites that gets indexed by mr google-bot, and I'd like to get as many pages in the index as possible. At the moment I've got a 'recent additions' page that is basically updated every day (with about 50 new links), but some of the links when they drop off that page end up being 2 or 3 links deep from the home-page.

On average around 500-1000 html pages get added each month (the site is closing in on 20,000 pages soon). Is a monthly/bi-weekly site map with the latest say 1000 links advisable or would the google-bot raise it's binary eye at me ;-)

Bobo

1000 links on one apge would be probably too much in my opinion.. I'd proabaly go for a multi-page site map if you have that many. Break the links down into different sections.

If they are all linked to somewhere in the site then they should get indexed eventually anyway (so long as the PR is high enough that googlebot thinks you deserve enough a fair bit of bandwidth and storage for 1,000's of documents.)

Take a glance at the site map for google for ideas...
http://www.google.co.uk/sitemap.html

I finally got around to doing a site map and thanks for suggestion Darrin, I am using a max of 150 links per page. Basically it's an archive style site map, but I'll have to wait till next month to see what the Google Bot makes of it. Hopefully it'll gobble up all the new content pages each month

I would make it even less than 150. Google stops following links at "more or less" 100 links (I say "more or less" because some people have reported that their page has been spidered when it was the 125th link on another page).

Your sitemap should serve for human visitors as well as those of the Googlebot kind. And fewer links on each sitemap page will distribute the internal PR in a better way.

Gringo.

Sitemaps are THE key to google success in my opinion.

I havent had any problems with Google indexing 500+ links off one page.