Question

Hi I have a client with a social network around 250k registered users each with a profile page. Site has multilingual pages in 200 languages giving the site well over 50 million pages. Thing is profile pages are quite light on content, but do contain some keywords in the general profile template. We need to do a sitemap for their site I'm wondering if it is better to try and list the profiles? Or just the English language profiles? Or just limit the sitemap to blog posts and other decent content? Used to be that Google liked megasites, not sure what the situation is now.  

Answer 1

I would start with listing the pages that are most likely to attract links from other sites. That could be the profile pages but maybe the most popular content, too.  

Comments

Yes RankMath plugin takes care of all the posts and pages, they have around 500 blog posts. Thing is, 250k - 50mil other pages makes this site quite huge. I'm curious as to whether sheer scale of an on-topic site would have impact on SEO or if all those pages would just dilute the good content.  

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@straticulate8 Scale shouldn't matter. I've worked with sites that had hundreds of thousands and millions of pages. Have advised clients with even larger sites. There are a lot of variables to consider and I usually advise people to prioritize the content. A sitemap file can hold up to 50, 000 URLs, and you can link to 50, 000 sitemap files. You have some wiggle room for experimentation. But for a site that size you DO want to think about crawl budget. YOU cannot manage it but you need to think about what you want the search engine to crawl the most often.  

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Thanks Michael