Question about paginated based URLs and category URLs with XML sitemaps

Question

I have a blog site that has this URL structure:

http://website.com/category/
http://website.com/category/page1/
http://website.com/category/subcat/
http://website.com/category/article_title

A flow could be like this:

Visit the website > Get to a category > Filter by sub category > Click on article

The category URL's show 12 of the newest posts, then there are paginated until they display the rest. The sub categories do the same thing.

My question is: Should I include the category, paginated, and sub category links? Or is the article title good enough for the sitemap?

*EDIT: Since /category/ and /category/subcat/ are the same content, I use a canonical URL on the subcat URL to point to its parent.

Answer 1

My question is: Should I include the category, paginated, and sub category links? Or is the article title good enough for the sitemap?

You should not include any categories, paginated pages or sub categories in your sitemap.xml if there is no unique and distinct content on those pages. You should only include your blog entries/articles in the sitemap.xml. Sitemap.xml is for a robot not a user, leave them out, and give it only the important articles and content to crawl. Adding category links to your article pages along with descriptive descriptions is sufficient.

Answer 2

I would include all the URL's and if you can create an HTML sitemap which Google suggests doing since crawling <a> is guaranteed to get your pages found while sitemaps are guidelines on what they should crawl.