Google says I should send them a sitemap. I tried using an automatic sitemap builder, and it ran all day without getting anywhere so I shut it down. My site just isn’t very crawlable. That’s why Google could use to have a site-map in the first place.
But there is no way I’m going to try build and maintain a site-map by hand. My site has: 2 Webcomics up for betareaders, at 140 pages, and 302 pages each plus indexes. There’s two short stories and three novel samples… I don’t even know how many pages that involves. I have two perpetual calendars (lets count that as 2, not infinity X 2, shall we?), 4 writing tutorials, 20 pages of “Extras”, like character interviews, art galleries, and card game instructions, plus 6 more activity aka “Fun” pages: two card games that can be played online, a mad-libs story game, a personality quiz, horoscopes, and a space pirate “paperdoll”.
There are 53 Information pages, 7 home pages — one for the site and one for each of the story world sections, and an additional 27 pages that list characters, or stories, or other pages. Plus a page for every character I’ve added to my character database… that’s 349 pages. And a page for about a third of my images… that’s fifty or so. And a page for every song/poem, that’s over 80 more. If you want to push the point you could say that there is a page for every location in the database (256), but only a handful of them have actual descriptions, so perhaps we should just mention that the computer generated location pages can display locations on 12 different maps.
I think we’re at around a thousand pages, and we haven’t even got to the blog yet.
I probably need to build my own automatic sitemap creator that can use my database files to build the sitemap instead of trying to crawl the site itself. Yet another thing to go on the to do list, I guess.