Segmenting HTML sitemaps for large websites

HTML sitemaps help user to easily navigate across a page with many URLs. They are easily created for smaller websites and serves usability as well. But imagine a website with more number of pages. Here let us take an example of ecommerce website which has 25 categories and each category has 400 pages.

So how can you segment for crawlers and visitors?

Here I have listed some methods below,

• Organize the categories as sub-domains. This may be the case for more number of pages in an ecommerce website structured in categories. Break down the categories and give links to sub-domain alone.

Create category (top-level category) specific sitemaps with all its siblings and include the sitemap sections to mother of all sitemaps.

• Links can be given only to main category. It is similar to the above but there is no need to create separate category specific sitemaps.

• Product offers, discounts can be used in a separate sitemap. This sitemap assist users to identify all the product offers, coupons and discounts easily instead of dumping everything in a single sitemap.

Besides Google webmaster guidelines there are still many websites that lists more than 100 links in a page (HTML sitemap). A HTML sitemap lacking a definite structure causes discomfort to the user. So I suggest making it simple. A perfect architecture makes users easy to navigate through the page.