Sitemap for 170 K webpages

[ArtiKalra]

I have 170 K pages on my website which I want to be indexed. I have created a multiple HTML sitemaps (e.g. sitemap1.html, sitemap2.html,...etc) with each sitemap page having 3000 links.

Is this right approach or should i switch to xml based sitemaps and that too multiple one.

Please suggest.

[Copstead]

Don't use html sitemaps, rather use XML sitemaps instead.

Here is a great post about utilizing XML sitemaps.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic

[AdoptionHelp]

There is no penalty for including multiple sitemaps. See this google blog post on the topic.

In addition to potentially getting more pages indexed as mentioned in the seomoz post link above, it will help keep you and the future site maintainers sane when its time to update or edit the sitemap.

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, you could do multiple XML Sitemaps and then do a sitemap-index.xml referring to each of the individual sitemaps. I would also then add the URL to the XML Sitemap Index file in the robots.txt Something like: Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap-index.xml