How many links on a site map?

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How many links on a site map?

Less than 100 links?

Allspec

2:56 pm on Jul 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Here is question that seems to have differing views. How many links should I have on my site map? Not the Google site maps, but our own. Currently we have over 500 dynamic links to all our product pages (on one page), but I am trying to convince our marketing department to decrease the number to less than 100, and turn them into static links. Please tell me what you all think?
According to Google, Yahoo, & MSN webamster guidlines, it seems that we need to limit our links per page, and change to static links.
Funny thing though, our site map right now has a PR of 3?

webdoctor

5:52 am on Jul 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

How many links should I have on my site map? Not the Google site maps, but our own.

Who is your site map for? Your visitors? Or search engine bots?

Check your logs - how many human visitors visit your site map? Do they find it useful? [FWIW, I've yet to find a site map that I like :-) ]

Do you actively direct visitors to your site map, or do you want visitors to use your 'normal' navigation?

Allspec

5:03 pm on Jul 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

The site map is obviously two-fold, but my intentions are mainly to create better internal linking, and to have these links (with good anchor text) be completely indexed.

Our logs do show some people visiting our site map. So where do you draw the line? Do you make people scroll thru 2-3 pages and provide better crawl, or do you leave 100's of links on one page, people scroll down a mile, and does not insure nor quarantee the links will be indexed?

specter

9:20 pm on Jul 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

Forget dynamic links.
Sitemap is a good way to allow crawlers to reach all your pages and so to index the whole site.Only,too many links could result in penalty as SEs could recognize them as a link farm.Best would be to spread them trough a text.
Surely the most advanced "bots" will take some time to check their "popularity",so if they are unpopular that will hurt your rankings.

Corey

12:43 pm on Jul 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

Given the above comments, is it really true that Google will not follow more than 100 links on a page?

Has anyone actually tested that?

specter

7:11 pm on Jul 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

Well,be accurate:
Google probably follows all 100 links and more:
The real question to do is:
How many "weight" gives to them?

The answer is:
It depends on various factors,particularly the PR and reliability of the "linker" and "linked" pages.