What are the negative implications of listing URLs in a sitemap that are then blocked in the robots.txt?

[richdan]

In running a crawl of a client's site I can see several URLs listed in the sitemap that are then blocked in the robots.txt file.

Other than perhaps using up crawl budget, are there any other negative implications?

[LesleyPaone]

I personally do not think there is any penalty SEO wise in doing it. Although, I do think it will mess up the metric in GWT that shows how many pages have been submitted and how many have been indexed. I find that metric useful, so it would make it no longer useful if there are a lot of pages blocked by the robots.txt.

[Dezzign]

I highly doubt it would effect rankings due to low quality issues but it will show that you have site map error warnings in your GWT console. That issue is technically classified as 'Warnings' and not 'Errors'. The right thing to do in that scenario is take the robots.txt block off and just use a 'noindex' tag on the pages. That way they can stay in the site map but they won't show up in the index. Otherwise you should remove them from the sitemap if you don't want the warnings in GWT.