: HTML sitemap vs spamming I have noticed that Google often encourages us to build HTML sitemaps that are easily accessible to the site visitors. If we create a bunch of HTML sitemap pages with

@Jennifer507

If you have the word sitemap some where, such as in the URL, heading of the page and links pointing to it, I think Google's pretty smart to figure out that its your sitemap for users. Also if you were spamming with a page full of links, they would generally be external.

However to make your sitemap actually usable for users, if you have thousands of different pages, you probably want to split them up into different sitemaps and/or headings, you also do not need to list every page, list the ones you feel are important.

E.g on eCommerce site you may have it split into heading such as below, you might not necessarily list every product page.

Main pages


home
a bout us
refund policy
Contact us


Categories


blue widgets
red widgets
yellow widgets
green widgets


Sub Categories


Small blue widgets
Big red widgets
Small yellow widgets
Big green widgets


Brand Categories


Sony widgets
Samsung widgets
Apple widgets
HTC widgets


Don't worry about using HTML sitemaps, they are very useful and millions of sites use them.

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@Sent6035632

Google will automatically crawl links as it finds them unless it runs into a link labeled as "nofollow" or a page with a robots tag containing "nofollow" in it.

If you plan to make a webpage on your site as a sitemap page, then try to make it user friendly by giving some sort of description of what each set of target URLs are about.

To make google understand that you mean a sitemap for search engines, and not a sitemap on a webpage that users see, you need to make an XML file in the sitemap format.

Take a look at this URL to understand more on sitemaps:
www.sitemaps.org/
And examples can be found here:
www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

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