Well yes, that's kinda my point. We do have a sensible, crawlable navigation so there will be no problems there, so then the sitemap really becomes an indicator of what needs to be crawled (new and updated pages), but then the same question stands...

With other sites we've managed with thousands of pages we've found it detrimental to give Google hundreds of pages to crawl on a sitemap that we don't feel are important. We're pretty sure (and SEOmoz staff have supported this) that domain authority and the number of pages you can get into the index are closely related.

Hi guys,

Ok this is a bit of a sitemap 101 question but I cant find a definitive answer:

When we're running out XML sitemaps for google to chew on (we're talking ecommerce and directory sites with many pages inside sub-categories here) is there any point in mentioning the homepage or even the second level pages? We know google  is crawling and indexing those and we're thinking we should trim the fat and just send a map of the bottom level pages.

What do you think?