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Hey there–assuming you've correctly implemented your hreflang tags (as alternate inks in your head codes, see example below) then Googlebot should not see these as duplicates of each other.

It's hard for me to weigh in on the other element of your question, "my blog structure is not standardized," without examples. How are you differentiating your international content in your URL structures?

Another question: are these blog articles actually localized? Meaning, is there custom content (e.g. events in X location) or differences (e.g. spelling conventions) for these regions? If not, you may not even need these international versions of your blog content if it's not being translated.

Both an image title and alt text are good SEO opportunities to target KWs (not in a spammy way). It's a missed opportunity for you to have an image without a title or alt text. In my book, alt text is more important and should be used as it's intended: to describe an image in the event a user cannot see that image.

Just because you don't see other wedding photogs put image titles on their photos doesn't mean you shouldn't: as long as your titles and alt text aren't spammy (don't do this, for instance: "wedding photo of wedding in progress, marriage and matrimony"), you likely will be at an advantage over your wedding photog competition.

All great points, Andreas, and thanks for sharing that resource with Ty1986.

I just want to call out user expectation (and ultimately user experience): our expectation is that faceted navigation narrows or alters content on a page. Users _expect _to see this in an easy-to-find place, such as above or to the left of the content the facets will alter. Unless you're proposing a sticky footer-style faceted nav (one that follows the user as they scroll), I encourage you not to use your footer for facets.

Sitemaps cannot (should not) contain more than 50,000 URLs: https://www.sitemaps.org/faq.html#faq_sitemap_size

I'd recommend you instead create a sitemap index to house multiple sitemap files. Keep in mind you will need to separate the URLs in them in order to represent all 60K URLs you have in your existing sitemap.

Separately, EGOL makes excellent points: sitemaps aren't the only way to get pages indexed. It's entirely possible that you do not have sufficient internal links that aid crawlers' discovery of your content: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

You may also have directives (e.g. noindex) on certain pages or in your robots.txt that prevents crawlers from crawling and indexing certain parts of your site. It may be time for a technical audit: https://www.distilled.net/technical-seo-audit-checklist/