I am still newbie in the entire world of SEO. Let's take a look at my example. I have a website very similar to blog style site. There few patterns for urls, all of the are very simple and allowed to be crawled.
Daily I submit new sitemap with accessible content with frequency=daily. The things on the site change very frequently. In addition I have many catalogs of blogs with pagination, one blog can be in few catalogs. In sitemap I submit only the main pages if the catalogs. Catalogs are allowed to be crawled.
I have a feeling that the crawler does very hard work, because it needs to scan every catalog with actually already indexed content because every blog could be crawled from the previous catalog or from the sitemap. Because of this, it looks like crawler will never finish his work, in webmaster tools I see a lot pages that were submitted months ago, currently deleted, and still in index even thought I retrieve 404 with noindex option. The nonsense is I can find old sitemap in the index, but how come, I thought at least files of sitemaps should be indexed daily.
What the preferred strategy in my case. Should I just mark the pagination in catalogs as "nofollow" content and leave only main page for every catalog. Actually I need only content in sitemap to be indexed. Because everything except the blog is just thousands of pages of pagination to the same blogs. Previously I heart very interesting idea about instead of tons of catalogs using archive with date navigation, and allow only it for crawler.
What's your opinion? Thanks!