How would you structure this sitemap?

I have over 8 million URLS on my site, and I'm trying to get a better understand of how everyone would structure the sitemaps for these?

I understand Google will only accept 50,000 URLS per sitemap, so that would be 160 sitemaps that I would need to create.

What does everyone think is the most effective way to do this?

If your pages are interlinked, why sitemap the whole thing. Google will crawl the links regardless, right. You could just sitemap your most recent, categories, tags, or ?
I don't know what type, or how your site is structured.
It would be difficult to 'structure' without that data..

Here is a resource link that might help :
dynamical.biz/blog/seo-technical/sitemap-strategy-large-sites-17.html

Just snatch some robot.txt from some large sites with billions of links, get some ideas from the structure(s) they are using.. You might think about the server load when generating a sitemap that large everytime it updates.

Hope it help's a bit..

Freeopkiller said:

You might think about the server load when generating a sitemap that large everytime it updates.
Hope it help's a bit..

Click to expand...

Thank you for the information. Can you explain a little about what you mean above?

Your server is going to generate the sitemaps when they change. Your talking about 8mil links, generally you would want to refresh and update your sitemap when new content is created/generated. I'd generate daily with a cron in the middle of the night, about 100k links on one of my sites.
It would slow my server down a bit when generating the file.

Again I don't know what type of site you have, I was just informing you to think about it when rebuilding a sitemap of that size..