Should I exclude my 'noindex, nofollow, noarchive' pages from my sitemap.xml?

Question

I have some legal pages on my website that I exclude with <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive">. The main goal is that these pages don't show up in search engines. Do I need to exclude it from my sitemap.xml or will the meta tags be sufficient. If not, why would I need to include it?

Answer 1

The sitemap is used by search engines to discover your content, so adding content you do not want to be indexed is not really useful.

This documentation page outlines when a sitemap is useful:

A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.