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Raj in India asks: “HTML site map v/s XML Sitemap. Which one is yummy for Google search engine spider?”
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Which is better: an HTML site map or XML Sitemap?
June 1st, 2010 
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June 1st, 2010 admin 
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The Webmaster Tools response to a submitted sitemap that reads:
Sitemap is HTML Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.
I think it’s referring to the CONTENT of the file rather than file type. It means theres HTML code inside it, which isn’t correct. It’s not supposed to be a list of links, it’s supposed to be a list of URLs. As mentioned in the video, even a simple text file list of each web page is helpful to Google – and those aren’t links.
paginate it so that you only show X urls per page. we have one that shows like 10,000 links per page.
HTML Sitemaps are not supported by Google Webmasters Tools indeed. It will be great if Matt Cuts show us how to submit a html sitemap to Google crawler.
Thanks!
Pity the HTML sitemaps are not accepted anymore in Googles Webmasters Tools, But still good for your visitors to your website.
No Matt both are not good in the Webmasters Tools.
Surprised you didn’t mention Google Webmaster Tools, which seems to favor xml sitemaps.
Follow up question: I have over 100,000 pages on one of my sites. How many internal links should be on a single page? Does formatting mater for html?
Thank you
Kyle Brown
Good Time Entertainment
Bakersfield, Ca
Thanks Matt for picking up that question and answering it.
Agreed.
Matt would be a great guy to have a beer with.
I think he gets pretty crazy when drunk tho…looks like the type
)
Everytime I watch these videos I am impressed at how useful the info is and that a Marketing/pseudo-webmaster can understand. Keep it up!
People pointing guns at webmasters’ heads and forcing them to pick between HTML and XML sitemaps is actually a growing problem – I’m glad Matt has the courage to address this issue.
Good question.
Simple, concise and helpful answer.
Google, you are awesome.