Sitemap for dynamic website with over 10,000 pages

[roundbrix]

If I have a website with thousands of products, is it a good idea to create a sitemap for this website for the search engines where you show maybe 250 products on a page so it makes it easy for the search engine to find the part and also puts that part closer to the home page?

Seems like google likes pages that are the closest to the home page (less clicks the better)

[JamesNorquay]

Are you referring to a XML site map or a HTML site map?

In my opinion what you can do is make a custom sitemap and then target all the top sub categorys/ top internal pages, normally you do not add say 20,000 product pages to a XML site map.

Similar strategy can be utilized with the XML sitemap and also the HTML site map.

[roundbrix]

I meant an HTML sitemap.

Are you saying to exclude certain products from the sitemap that are not popular?

thanks!

[RyanKent]

HTML sitemaps are generally designed for users, where XML sitemaps are designed for search engines. While either party could use either form of sitemap, each format is optimized for their intended audience.

If your site has proper navigation set up, a sitemap has almost no value at all. The modern day value of a sitemap submission to search engines is to alert search engines to web pages they would not otherwise locate during a crawl.

250 products seems like a lot to present on a page for an average user. Many product pages offer numerous links for each product for image viewing, examining the main product page, options such as colors, etc. A page with 250+ products seems unfriendly to most users and search engines, as I imagine the page may have 500+ links.

[ASOS]

From my experience HTML sitemaps are generally ignored a lot now by search engines. You could do a basic one for users but otherwise put your efforts into getting a very good XML sitemap, that will help you more than what is generally just a static HTML page, that like most things on footers nowadays, are ignored by the SEs.

A