Site Map

Is there a limit to the amount of links that a site map should have on it? I read somwhere that if there are too many, it reflects bad and the page should be broken up? Does anyone have any thoughts or experience on this?

Thanks.

I have heard that google only concerns itself with the first 100 links.

Yes it's suggested use less than 100 links,
however many people include more than that and google still crawl them

yes .. one of seochat's members ( can't remember his nickname atm ) posted somewhere in a thread one of his experiences with a site map he had. He put in a single file 4000+ links to all his internal links, the file size was 125 kb and he got crawled by the googlebot

this reveals the fact that googlebot would crawl large files with a large number of links on it, but to be sure you avoid any possible risk for now or for the future, i would suggest you to keep your site map files less than 100 kb of size and less than 100 links pe page.

if you site gets bigger and bigger you should split your site map in multiple files within the mentioned requirements

Joc and I think it has something to do with both the use of internal vs external links and the page's PR (similar to how a higher PR page gets visited by Googlebot more...the page size limit might be higher too).

Here's that example:
http://www.easyautopart.com/car_exterior.html

It doesn't have 4000+ pages, but each and every one of these product pages has been indexed by Google, so it does work (considering the size of the file) -- a caveat is that I will be readjusting this and the other pages on the site to be more managable for the user (never forget the importance of the user).

Cygnus

just keep the filesize under 100k, if you have 95k+ in links split them up to ensure spidering