In a sitemap, is it advisable to include links to every page on the site, or only ones that need it?

Question

I'm in the process of creating a sitemap for my website. I'm doing this because I have a large number of pages that can only be reached via a search form normally by users.

I've created an automated method for pulling the links out of the database and compiling them into a sitemap. However, for all the pages that are regularly accessible, and do not live in the database, I would have to manually go through and add these to the sitemap.

It strikes me that the regular pages are those that get found anyway by ordinary crawlers, so it seems like a hassle manually adding in those pages, and then making sure the sitemap keeps up to date on any changes to them.

Is it a bad to just leave those out, if they're already being indexed, and have my sitemap only contain my dynamic pages?

Answer 1

Yes, I think it is not a good to leave them out. I think it would also be advisable to look for a way that your search pages can be found by a crawler without a sitemap. For example, you could add some kind of advanced search page where a user can select in a form the search term. Crawlers can also fill in those forms.