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Is there anything "wrong" with having a very simple page in my WordPress site with HTML and text links showing the key pages that I'd like to send my human visitors to?

And - in addition, I can have an actual .xml file for all other links?

That ok or would that confuse Google/Search Engines?

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    Do you have any evidence that humans would use such a sitemap? In my experience, they never get used.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Aug 25, 2020 at 2:20
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    I think in my case it will because I offer a directory of global countries, so it is in many ways easier to scan countries in the EU for example...(if that makes sense!)
    – Henry
    Aug 25, 2020 at 3:26
  • Every site is different. Visitors to every site are different as well. If your users find value, you shouldn't be worried. But think twice, brainstorm or even test (with limited users like in a focus group) to check if users really use it before implementing. Like @StephenOstermiller pointed out, humans rarely use sitemaps-like pages for regular navigation. But your case may be different. Maybe you can put a list, with a filter(s) on top to narrow down results, add sort feature and so on.
    – Kannan
    Aug 25, 2020 at 3:49
  • Or after you implement the sitemap for human, check your stats and see what percent of users actually use it. If you find 0.01% of visitors use it, it probably isn't worth keeping.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Dec 8, 2020 at 11:29

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It is very ok to do it.

The index bots(crawlers) will not be confused about that in any manner because they only read the .XML files about the sitemap. So, just a recommendation if you're going to perform that action of having 2 sitemaps, create a no index tag in the sitemap.xml file for the site map page in order to not affect search engine searches unless you want that your site map appears in the searches engines.

You can have an .XML for all your links/sites, that's the purpose of the sitemap.xml file.

As you're talking about Google, I would recommend you to use Google Search Console to handle all the search results regarding your domain/site.

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