What sort of sitemap should I submit?

[JimSEO]

Hi guys, I was wondering if someone could help me out.

I manage a large ecommerce site, and need to submit a sitemap to Google. This site has thousands of internal links, so would it be better for me to submit a sitemap that includes every page, or not go quite as deep? Maybe just down to product categories as opposed to all of the individual products?

Or should I split the sitemaps entirely, and submit one for the main categories, and another for deeper product pages?

Does anyone have any experience in dealing with this?

Thanks

[Dexter AJ]

I do not know what would be the best way to do it. But I do want to know, if there is anything bad going to happen if I do not submit a site map? Is it important?

[Maraun]

I have no experience with sites that scale so take my advise with a grain of salt.

You should submit the complete sitemap. The sitemap only tells Google which pages you have on your site and the time of last update of the page.

Which of your pages actually end up in the index is a completely different matter and hasn't to do anything with the sitemap. The sitemap only helps Google to see new pages earlier, so it might speed indexing up a bit for pages that were going to get indexed anyway.

[timbarker]

I don't use sitemap for ecommerce sites but I can still get great results. For some ecommerce sites sitemap is not good because you add and update tons of products. If you add products it adds new link, if you remove products it also remove links. So I think search engines may encounter some problems crawling your sitemap.

If you want to create sitemap for visitors, you may just add categories on your homepage. Like brand names of your products, types of products and etc.

[Sitemapper]

A website with "thousands of unique pages" will not cause any kind of problems with regards to creating or submitting XML sitemaps You should submit all page URLs that are not duplicate URLs of other pages.