Benefits to having an HTML sitemap?

[BostonWright]

We are currently migrating our site to a new CMS and in part of this migration I'm getting push-back from my development team regarding the HTML sitemap. We have a very large news site with 10s of thousands of pages. We currently have an HTML sitemap that greatly helps with distributing PR to article pages, but is not geared towards the user. The dev team doesn't see the benefit to recreating the HTML sitemap despite my assurance that we don't want to lose all these internal links since removing 1000s of links could have a negative impact on our Domain Authority.

Should I give in and concede the HTML sitemap since we have an XML one? Or am I right that we don't want to get rid of it?

[AlanMosley]

the xml and html sitemaps are completly different in what they do.

You dont want to have more then 250 links on a page, http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-too-many-hyperlinks

but 250 * 250 is 62500, so with one leverl you can get a lot of pages linked.

all the pages should be linked somehow, and all should link back to your home page and landing pages if posible.

I dont know your developers, but many CMS developers are limited by the capapabilities of the CMS, and expect the customer to bend to those limitations, i cant see why they would not do it if they have the ability.

Have a read of this page for a quick explaination of how Page rank flows.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

[BostonWright]

Our html sitemap is broken down into different pages that never contain more than 250 links. All pages are linked via the top nav back to the homepage and to their section/subsection.

The issue I'm having is not that they don't know how to recreate our html sitemap in the new CMS. It's that they don't believe it serves a purpose. And given limited resources, they don't want to work on this in favor of other more crucial work.

My biggest concern is the removal of thousands of internal links. Should I be worried about this?

[AlanMosley]

It sure is, read the link i sent you, it explains why.

This is not a big job, and it is very important