If .htaccess redirects domainroot to a localized start page, should the domain root (which should be canonical) be in the sitemap.xml?

Question

When you host a webpage, e.g., https://mydomain.example and .htaccess already takes care of the rewrite from www to without www and from http to https and it is also rewriting with RewriteRule ^$ https://mydomain.example/en/page1.html [R=301,L] to https://mydomain.example/en/page1.html (this file obviously holds the actual HTML code) and you have also other pages https://mydomain.example/en/page2.html , https://mydomain.example/en/page3.html etc. and a similar set of pages for another language https://mydomain.example/de/page1.html (with just the same content in e.g. german language), https://mydomain.example/de/page2.html , https://mydomain.example/de/page3.html etc.

then Google gives some advice in Tell Google about localized versions of your page.

I did that, but I did not figure out whether I should keep https://mydomain.example and / or https://mydomain.example/en/page1.html in my sitemap.

Now the incoming external backlinks all point to https://mydomain.example. This is the reason why I put <link rel="canonical" href="https://mydomain.example"> in the header of https://mydomain.example/en/page1.html

The google search console indexed https://mydomain.example correctly and put https://mydomain.example/en/page1.html into the not indexed category due to Duplicate without user-selected canonical. It has meanwhile also disappeared from there.

Only recently google chrome lighthouse has added a SEO error for my setup "Document does not have a valid rel=canonicalPoints to the domain's root URL (the homepage), instead of an equivalent page of content".

Should https://mydomain.example and https://mydomain.example/en/page1.html both be in my sitemap?

Also, should I

a.) change the setup to make https://mydomain.example/en/page1.html my canoncial page? or

b.) to make https://mydomain.example/en/ my canonical startup and work with a DirectoryIndex to point to page1.html ? or

c.) leave https://mydomain.example as the canonical page since the incoming links go there?

Please note that I found a relevant answer to my question (see below), but it is very old and the accepted answer was never upvoted, so I am unsure if it (still) applies:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27963185/which-url-should-be-in-sitemap-xml-when-redirecting-request

Edit: Trying to make my question more clear I made substantial edit. Sorry for any invonvenience caused.

Answer 1

Your sitemap should contain the URLs that you want search engines to index. It should not contain any URLs that:

1. Redirect
2. Are not canonical

Google says:

List only canonical URLs in your sitemaps. If you have multiple versions of a page, list in the sitemap only the one you prefer to appear in search results. If you have multiple versions of your site (for example, www and non-www), decide which is your preferred site, and put the sitemap there, and add rel=canonical or redirects on the other site.

Therefore the following URLs should be included in your sitemap:

• https://mydomain.example/en/home.html
• https://mydomain.example/de/home.html
• https://mydomain.example/es/home.html

And the following URLs should be omitted from your sitemap:

• https://mydomain.example/
• http://mydomain.example/
• https://www.mydomain.example/

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As an aside, I would recommend removing home.html from your URLs. https://mydomain.example/en/ is a cleaner, simpler, more user-friendly URL compared to https://mydomain.example/en/home.html. Default documents like index.html and home.html should never appear in URLs to the user.