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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

      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

        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

          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 Reply Quote 0
          • Martijn_Scheijbeler
            Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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