Should I include unnecessary pages in the sitemap.xml

[Silviu]

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?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

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.

[Silviu]

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]

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.