I'm working on building sitemaps and am not sure what should and should not be added.
For example:
http://www.website.com/index.php
http://www.website.com/en/index.php
All of these URLs lead to the same page. https://www.website.com/ is the preferred address.
Should I write all of these variations in the sitemap and assign the nonpreferred ones an update frequency of never, priority 0. Or simply not include them in the sitemap at all?
Nearly every link on the site could be reached with a similar combination.
Similarly, I have many links that contain parameters https://www.website.com/en/catalog?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=CTA&utm_campaign=Test
Should these be in the sitemap with the same update frequency never, priority 0 or simply not included?
The documentation I've read, says that the sitemap is used to teach the search engine about your site and give priority to pages, so it makes sense to me that I would want to add all of these links so I can explicitly educate the search engine NOT to bother checking these links.
Additionally
The site contains a catalog of products which can be filtered through in multiple ways (by color, and size for example). Each filter changes the url like such:
The main catalog: https://www.website.com/catalog/
filtered for blue: https://www.website.com/catalog/color-blue/
filtered for large: https://www.website.com/catalog/large/
filtered for blue & large: https://www.website.com/catalog/large/color-blue/
With three types of filters and 5 to 15 options for each filter, this potentially creates 75 different links which essentially display the same content. Should all of these potential links be listed in the sitemap, only the main catalog link, or only the first level of filter links, or every potential URL?