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I have a Wiki site (running MediaWiki) which I am trying to optimize in terms of page speed and SEO. One of the many things in my to-do list is submit a sitemap on Google Webmaster tools, now here is my scenario.

I have just finished generating my sitemap and it has over 70K URLs indexed. Due to the way MediaWiki is built most of these pages aren’t actual content but secondary pages, such as properties, editing forms, etc. they are mainly for internal site managing use, although they are not protected and anyone who cares may access those URL, that’s why the sitemap picked them up. And now here is my question.

Will submitting this sitemap do me any good or will it just confuse Google about which pages are actually important in my site? Can this even hurt my site to Google’s eyes?

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    You only want content pages in your sitemap. Google is not grading your work, but you do not want junk pages indexed either.
    – closetnoc
    Sep 7, 2015 at 13:19

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You generally won't want these excess pages in your sitemap. The sitemap should only contain links to URLs you actually indexed & listed by search engines.

If you have property/form URLs in your sitemap, you've probably used a 3rd party Sitemap Generator. These just crawl all links on your website indescriminately, whereas something like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:GenerateSitemap.php should ignore those, as it's a maintenance script built into MediaWiki for this purpose.

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  • I think I would break the link to these pages too. You can always use a bookmark to get to them later. Otherwise, they may get indexed anyway.
    – closetnoc
    Sep 7, 2015 at 23:53
  • You wouldn't break the link in the case of a wiki, as that's the only way for users to access editing functionality. There may be a way to nofollow the pages though.
    – Andrew Lott
    Sep 8, 2015 at 17:06
  • Yes. Of course you are right! Silly me. ;-) It should at least be nofollow.
    – closetnoc
    Sep 8, 2015 at 17:21

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