I have written about HTML sitemaps a few times now. I covered the basic idea and how PCInsurance and Airbnb use them, how the New York Times uses them to keep every article back to 1851 within five clicks of the home page, and more examples from HBR, WebMD, and The Art of Manliness.
Those examples were mostly publishers with large topic taxonomies, one regional insurance site, and a marketplace. There is a category I have not covered, and it might be the most useful one for anyone doing B2B or SaaS work: software companies sitting on hundreds of keyword-targeted landing pages with no sane way to link them.
Bitrix24 is a clean example of it.
The Quick Refresher
An HTML sitemap has nothing to do with an XML sitemap. They solve different problems.
It is just a page of organized links, styled or not. Its job is to give crawl paths and some link equity to pages that matter but do not belong in your navigation.
That last part is the whole point. Every site has pages that are worth having and would look ridiculous in a nav menu.
What Bitrix24 Does
Bitrix24 sells an all-in-one business platform. Like most SaaS companies of that size, they have built a landing page for nearly every specific way somebody might search for what they do.
Their /uses page is where those pages live. It holds north of 100 links, grouped under about 27 category headings: CRM, Project Management, Management, Telephony, Sales, Forms, ERP, Live Chat, Intranet, Groupware, Invoicing, File Server, and on down the list. The CRM group alone has more than 30 links in it.
Look at what those pages actually are:
- Free CRM for Accountants and Bookkeepers
- CRM System For Insurance Agents
- Best Free CRM For WordPress
- Free CRM for Financial Advisors
- Cheap Virtual Toll-Free Number Rental
- Free Home Owner Association Management Software
- Free Online Gantt Chart Maker For Goal Tracking
Each one targets a specific search. Each one is a real page they want indexed and ranking. And there is no version of a navigation menu that holds all of them without looking like a link farm.
So the nav does not hold them. The only way in is a single link in the footer, under Resources, labeled “Uses.” One footer link, sitewide, feeding a page that then feeds everything else.
Two things they get right that are worth stealing. The links are grouped under real category headings instead of dumped into one long list, which makes the page usable by a human and gives the grouping some meaning. And the anchor text is the full page title, so every link is descriptive rather than a generic “click here” or a bare keyword.
One thing they got sloppy on, since I am not going to pretend it is perfect: one of the category headings on the page is literally “use-case,” which is a CMS field artifact nobody cleaned up. Small, but it is the kind of detail that tells you these pages get generated and then forgotten.
When You Would Reach For One
The Bitrix24 case is the SaaS version, but the pattern shows up in a lot of businesses.
A local service business with service-area pages. This is the classic, and I have covered it before. A contractor serving 30 towns builds 30 pages. Putting all 30 in the nav looks sloppy and spammy. An HTML sitemap handles it.
A national or regional business with industries-served pages. This one I have not covered, and it is probably the most common miss. A commercial cleaning company, a staffing firm, an industrial equipment distributor, a managed IT provider. All of them serve a long list of industries, and all of them benefit from a page per industry. You might feature five or six in the nav. You are not putting 25 up there.
SaaS use-case and integration pages. Bitrix24’s version. Also applies to the integration directories most software companies build, where every “works with X” page needs a home.
Comparison and alternatives pages. If you have built a page for every competitor you get compared to, those pages need internal links from somewhere, and the nav is not it.
Publishers with big topic taxonomies. Covered in the earlier notes. Same mechanic.
What Actually Happens When You Build One
Here is the honest version of the mechanics, because “spread around link equity” gets used loosely and it is worth being precise.
Your sitemap page picks up equity from being linked in the footer on every page of the site. It then passes some of that along to each page it links to, divided among them. That is the mechanism.
Which means the math matters. A page with 116 outbound links splits whatever it has 116 ways. Per page, that is a trickle. Bitrix24 is not ranking those CRM pages because of the /uses page. They rank because of everything else Bitrix24 has going for it, and the sitemap makes sure those pages are reachable and not orphaned.
But your sitemap does not need to be that big, and smaller is often better. A local business with 25 town pages, or a distributor with 20 industry pages, has a page that concentrates far more into each link than Bitrix24’s does. If you have 20 pages to support, build a page with 20 links on it. There is no prize for volume here, and the dilution problem gets worse the more you pile on.
The real wins are less glamorous than a ranking boost and more reliable. Pages get discovered and crawled. Pages get indexed. Pages stop being orphans that exist in your CMS and nowhere in your link graph. That is a floor, not a rocket. As I said about PCInsurance in the first note, it is not the only reason they rank well.
What Separates a Good One From a Link Dump
Group the links under headings. A flat list of 100 links is worse for a person and gives you nothing structurally. Bitrix24’s category grouping is the right instinct.
Use descriptive anchor text. The page title usually works fine.
Link it sitewide, from the footer. That is what gives the page enough equity to have something to pass along.
Do not noindex it and do not nofollow the links. I have seen people build one of these and then quietly wall it off, which defeats the entire purpose.
Do not make it the only internal link to a page that genuinely matters. If a page is important, it should be earning contextual links from relevant content too. The sitemap is a safety net, not a substitute for real internal linking.
Split or tier it if it gets huge. The New York Times does a great job of this. They start by year, then month, and then date. You can check out their HTML sitemap here: https://www.nytimes.com/sitemap/
And the pages have to be real. This is the one that matters most. An HTML sitemap organizes access to your pages. It does nothing about whether those pages deserve to exist. If you have 200 thin, near-duplicate pages with the town name swapped out, a sitemap just gives you a tidy index of a problem.
The Caveat
Worth repeating what I said last time. Google is technically against location landing pages of the kind a lot of local businesses build, and they have not done much about it. That has been the state of things for years. The same logic applies to industry pages and use-case pages: if each one says something genuinely different and useful, you are fine, and if they are the same page with a word swapped, you are exposed whenever Google decides to care.
An HTML sitemap does not launder thin content. It just makes it easier to find.
The Takeaway
If you have a set of pages that deserve to be indexed but would look absurd in your navigation, that is the signal. Build one page, group the links, link it in the footer, and let it do its quiet work.
It is one of the oldest, least exciting techniques in SEO, and it still solves a problem most sites have.
