Google’s John Mueller offered solutions and advises an SEO not to create a sitemap manually for a big website. The thread occurred on Reddit in the r/SEO subreddit where an SEO was looking for advice to create a sitemap for a large website with more than 2 million products.

Thread Statements:

“I have a client in a very technical, industrial niche. They sell industrial parts that are similar, but very specific. They have 2 Million + SKUs in their inventory.

My challenge here is to create a sitemap. Because there are so many pages, I have to create it manually. I have a list of URLs broken up by products and categories that our dev team pulled through API. Since sitemaps can only contain 50,000 URLs, I have 37 excel sheets with 50,000 URLs on them each…”

John Mueller’s Response 

Mueller states in his response “Do not create a sitemap manually”. Instead of creating sitemaps manually do this in the situation:

“You need to get [the sitemap] from the CMS or the underlying database directly.”

Recommendation: Google Introducing A Video Series To Help Marketers Enhance Digital Marketing Opportunities

Why Do This Over Creating A Sitemap Manually?

When creating a sitemap for a big website the focus should not only be on how it will be created but how it will be kept updated. A website such a large product catalog could be removing or adding numerous products every day and it is logistically not possible to keep an updated sitemap like that. Manually creating a sitemap is not the solution considering there are automated options that exist.

SEO Came To Their Senses

SEO who started the thread understood that manually creating a sitemap is not the right thing to do.

“Thanks for the wake-up call guys. I agree, this was the plan of action laid out for us and it didn’t sit right with me from the beginning.”