XML Sitemap Too Big?

Question

Having an XML sitemap is important for SEO, but should I limit the pages that are listed in the file? Here is my situation:

My client wants a high school biology review site. One of the features is a 'Word of The Day', which is a specific word, a 2 sentence quick explanation, and a separate 2-3 paragraph explanation with pictures. I'll anticipate 250-400 total 'words of the day'.

There will be an index that lets you view any of these words you want, in addition to today's word. Essentially, each of words' big explanation is a separate page.

My question is, should I make a separate XML sitemap entry for each of these? Overall, that could make the sitemap over 400 entries. I'm inclined to do it, since my understanding of SEO is that the more you list items, the higher likelihood they will be indexed.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

You don't need to worry if you just have a small sitemap with just a few hundred urls. Having more urls doesn't make it more likely to have them indexed. But you shouldn't worry about that. Most likely all of them will be indexed.

You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50MB (52,428,800 bytes). If you would like, you may compress your Sitemap files using gzip to reduce your bandwidth requirement; however the sitemap file once uncompressed must be no larger than 50MB. If you want to list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemap files.

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#index (updated quote on March 11, 2019)