Should you point backlinks to your HTML sitemap?

I have an e-commerce website running magneto. Magento automatically generates 2 HTML sitemaps (1 for products & 1 for product categories) and a "Search Terms" page. I have links to these pages in my footer. I want to know if I should build links to these pages.

I obviously am not trying to rank thease pages in google. I want to build links to the sitemap to pass some link juice to the product and category pages linked to from the sitemap.

In my current SEO strategy I always build links to pages I have no desire to rank, such as "contact" and "about us" pages. I think google would think it is strange if a large website only has links to the 30 or so pages it is trying to rank.

The only reason I ask about the sitemap and search terms pages is because I thought this MIGHT look unnatural to google.

NOTE: I understand that the bulk of my SEO efforts should be focused on ranking my money pages, however maintaining a NATURAL LOOKING link profile is very important to me witch includes backlink diversity


Here are examples of the Sitemaps and Search Terms pages in question for those who are unfamiliar with Magento. This is not my website, it is the magento demo store.

Categories Sitemap

Products Sitemap

Search Terms

NOTE: The "search terms" page is an auto generated page that uses keywords that people searched using your websites search function and the keyword links to the pages that the users go to after searching said keyword

I don't think it would hurt. However, generally sitemaps aren't linked to internally, so it would look a bit unnatural for you to have backlinks to them since there's no real way for your users (traffic) to have found the sitemap and would provide a link to it. Even with this said, I highly doubt linking to your sitemap would run the risk of a penalty or anything like that.

He's not referring to an xml sitemap that you'd manually submit to google.

If you were going to add higher PR backlinks I'd suggest just doing it to the categories page, so it'd trickle down to the product pages. It'd be easier to get higher quality backlinks for the categories as opposed to many lower quality links to many more product pages (and potentially face a penalty if done incorrectly).

I don't know what kind of search terms you'd be receiving for your site, but perhaps you could rank a generic keyword for your niche so it was a somewhat relevant anchored backlink.

Why would you care if a sitemap has high PR? No, if you're going to spam, at least make it somewhat worthwhile.

I've taken the sitemap for some of my sites, then formatted them with this puppy for a variety of terms, then run it through SB (not a full-on blast, of course) just to ensure that I'm building links to all of my pages...for some sites, that means thousands of products...a sitemap is the only way to ensure you're hitting them all.

I've taken the sitemap for some of my sites, then formatted them with this puppy for a variety of terms, then run it through SB (not a full-on blast, of course) just to ensure that I'm building links to all of my pages...for some sites, that means thousands of products...a sitemap is the only way to ensure you're hitting them all.