Best practices for migrating an html sitemap? Or just get rid of it all together?

[BostonWright]

We are migrating a very large site to a new CMS and I'm trying to determine the best way to handle all the links (~15k) in our html sitemap. The developers don't see the purpose of using an html sitemap anymore and I have yet to come up with a good reason why we should migrate rather than just get rid of the sitemap since it is not very useful to users. The html sitemap was created about 6 years ago when page rank sculpting was a high priority.

Currently, since we already have an XML sitemap, I'm not sure that there's really a need for a html sitemap, other than to maintain all the internal links. How valuable are the internal links found in an html sitemap? And will it be a problem if we remove these from our link profile? 15,000 links sounds significant, but they only account for less than .5% of our internal links.

What do all you think?

[Bristolweb]

I think the need for html site maps has past, they can be useful for visitors to the site but when you get to higher number of links it can become mind blowing and confusing.

You should aim to have good  hierarchic  structured navigation on the site  with plenty of use of breadcrumbs to make it easier to navigate the site.

what ever you do -make sure you have the keep the XML site map in place.

[BostonWright]

any thoughts on the impact of removing the internal links in the sitemap? will this hurt our domain authority? Or given the low amount of links compared to our whole link profile, is it not that significant to cause concern?