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  4. Should I include unnecessary pages in the sitemap.xml

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Should I include unnecessary pages in the sitemap.xml

On-Page Optimization
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  • Silviu
    Silviu last edited by Aug 7, 2015, 5:23 AM

    I have a lot of pages that I don't want Google to index, so for most of them, I used cannonical, were they were duplicates, noindex were I wanted to remove the pages, but the question is: Should I include these pages in the sitemap.xml, or just the important pages?

    Also should I include them in order to get the changes indexed fastet by Google?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Martijn_Scheijbeler
      Martijn_Scheijbeler @Silviu last edited by Aug 7, 2015, 6:22 AM Aug 7, 2015, 6:22 AM

      That clearly changes my ideas about this ;-). As we're talking about a couple of million pages I wouldn't include them in the sitemaps then and to make sure they're absolutely made sure that it's noindexed.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Silviu
        Silviu last edited by Aug 7, 2015, 5:32 AM Aug 7, 2015, 5:32 AM

        One of the main problem is that there are a lot of such pages (aprox. 2-3 milions) and my indexation rate is really slow for a site this big. The old sitemap structure was to complex, and I wanted so simplify it, so Google wiil crawl only the important pages

        Martijn_Scheijbeler 1 Reply Last reply Aug 7, 2015, 6:22 AM Reply Quote 0
        • Martijn_Scheijbeler
          Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by Aug 7, 2015, 5:27 AM Aug 7, 2015, 5:27 AM

          Hi Silviu,

          Hard question, related to your use case I would suggest not to include them. But on the other hand it also shouldn't harm your performance as the URLs in a sitemap are mostly meant to search engines as a full list of URLs they might miss otherwise. It would also help you to see what your indexation rate is. Curious to see what other people think about this.

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