I need some advice here, whats the best way to produce a sitemap for google, bear in mind my site is massive (over 30,000 unique pages), also is worth putting a link to a sitemap on my site, if so what the best format

Thanks

i've had good experience building site maps with this tool - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ - but there's a limit of 500 pages.

Sorry I wasn't more help!

Joe

Google's webmaster tools provide you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. Check this links for google sitemap:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Originally Posted by sigmahotels

I need some advice here, whats the best way to produce a sitemap for google, bear in mind my site is massive (over 30,000 unique pages), also is worth putting a link to a sitemap on my site, if so what the best format

Thanks

the Xml-sitemap is a good one you can pay for the full version its what I use it can index up to 50,000 urls its 10 euro

Okay, since nobody had the right answer, let me give it a try.

As per Google's documentations, blogs, and releases, XML sitemaps are only for sites that Googlebot can't crawl for some reason. If you use way too many query string parameters ( http://someurl.biz?id=1&somevariable...=5&excessive=6 ), if your site only works with sessions, or if you hacked up the html in a blender, web spiders generally won't be able to crawl it and discover (1) your content, and (2) your navigation structure, ie links to other pages in your site.

If you don't have any of these issues, and they can crawl your site like most of the billions of sites on the web, then you don't need an xml map, and it won't do any good.

Thanks Forrest Croce, I see google indexes most of my pages, and creating a site map for 30,000+ pages is a nightmare, so I'll leave it - cheers

I think they have a limit to how many pages they'll index per day, depending on how long your site's been around. So it's natural they haven't indexed the whole thing yet, at that size.

I see google indexes most of my pages, and creating a site map for 30,000+ pages is a nightmare, so I'll leave it

On a site of that size (and over), is one place (the only) where the blanket advice of "get more links" actually is good advice

do you mean more inbound links?

Yep

Get enough (deep preferably) links and you will have no need for Google sitemaps on bigger sites.

Your sites biggest problem is the querystrings though, and it's the same thing there, enough external links can (though not always) get a site crawled deeper.

Normally I would recommend URL rewriting, but in doing so you would cripple the site for several months until the SEs had updated all the URLs.