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Basically, my site has a bunch of pages like Password Recovery, Sign Up, the page that says "Thank you!" after signing up, etc.
Those pages obviously don't have any marketing stuff in them and aren't intended as the landing pages.
Would it make sense to remove them from the sitemap.xml file?
You should add the URLs of your pages which you want to get crawled and indexed.
Don’t you want your password recovery page to get crawled/indexed? Then don’t add it. (And if you want to disallow crawling of your password recovery page, add it to robots.txt; if you want to disallow indexing of your password recovery page, use noindex; don’t use both).
Should you want your password recovery page to get crawled/indexed? I would say yes. Some users might want to use a search engine to find this page (instead of visiting your site and finding a link to the page). But this is primarily a usability question, it doesn’t affect SEO much.
The same goes for the sign up page.
Your "Thank you" pages ideally wouldn’t exist in the first place (you’d typically display the message on the same page, or on the otherwise existing page you get redirected to after submitting the form), but if you need them, they would be good candidates for pages that shouldn’t get added to the sitemap. And you should noindex them, too.
There's no reason to announce them to Google unless you think your site is going to start to rank on keywords like "Thank you" or "Password Recovery".
The sitemap.xml is expected to include absolutely all your public website pages. Google will sort them out as required.
I suppose your question is more likely to be in link with SEO than technology in itself. All my sites that rank well include all their public pages in their sitemap.xml. I really do not think Google cares. It would find them anyway, so having them in the sitemap.xml makes sense.
When I look at the statistics in the Google Webmaster tools, I can see that the it always says that about 10 to 20 pages are not included in their index. This is probably because they do not care about login, logout, thanks pages.
Since only robots are expected to read that file, it is safe to assume that if it includes boring pages, it won't hurt anyone.
However, if you can, add a priority and set it to a very low amount for those specific pages (like 0.1). That way it will probably rarely bother even looking at them. Without the As pointed out by Stephen in a comment, the frequency and priority parameters are now mostly ignored by Google. Instead the robot uses the last modification date to see what has changed compared against what they have in their index.sitemap.xml, you have a way to give a weight to the page. So I think it is a powerful way to tell Google, don't bother too much about those.
