Keeping the Navigation on the Sitemap HTML Page?

[JamesO]

Hey everyone. We are about to create a sitemap.html page and have always just kept the site theme in place and put the sitemap in the "content" section of the page, with the header navigation, sidebars and footer in place.

Well, now with the new "only first link counts" Google rule, wouldn't it be better to just have a "plain" html sitemap page without any other links on it?

[tylerfraser]

Your navigation, header and footer should be as seo friendly as whatever your html sitemap links would be. But really this is distracting from the content of the page. I like one column, no navigation on your html page. Keep the look of your site. Keep the header and footer to look nice.

Have a look at how the pros do it: http://www.bruceclay.com/sitemap.htm

[eyepaq]

If  you are a visitor/user on your site would you like to see a blank page with the site structure or a innerpage (header/footer) with the structure in the body area ?

If you build it for the Search Engine it will be good to strip the rest of the "normal" site elements like your footer, header and side bars if any but if you do it for the users - to help them navigate easier from this page then you should keep the site look and feel for a better user experience.

More then that since - at least Google - will take in consideration as far as ranking and signals sites that are build to improve the user experience I think your best bet is to go with a normal inner page with the structure of the site in the body area.

If you have authority your sitemap html will get indexed fast with no issues even if you have 100+ links on that page including your main navigation and footer links.

In my opinion you should definitely go with the normal theme and place the sitemap/structure in the "content area" .

Here is a link from google webmaster tool set that might help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0

(to clear the issue with the indexation aspect)

Hope it helps !

[AlanBleiweiss]

I totally agree with the notion that User Experience dictates keeping it in a regular site template. And an html page devoted to being a sitemap is supposed to be for users, not search engines.  The days of having one page with nothing but links should be over in everyone's mind anyhow.  If all a page does is provide links, with no content around them, the SEO value of all those links is minor now.

Then we can talk about how much value those sitemap on-page links have anyhow -  if you've got fifty or five hundred links on that page, they're not passing very much value for SEO, regardless of whether there's top navigation, or anything else on the page.