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XML sitemap and rel alternate hreflang requirements for Google Shopping

Technical SEO

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awilliams_kingston last edited by

Our company implemented Google Shopping for our site for multiple countries, currencies and languages. Every combination of language and country is accessible via a url path and for all site pages, not just the pages with products for sale. I was not part of the project. We support 18 languages and 14 shop countries. When the project was finished we had a total of 240 language/country combinations listed in our rel alternate hreflang tags for every page and 240 language/country combinations in our XML sitemap for each page and canonicals are unique for every one of these page. My concern is with duplicate content. Also I can see odd language/country url combinations (like a country with a language spoken by a very low percentage of people in that country) are being crawled, indexed, and appearing in serps. This uses up my crawl budget for pages I don't care about. I don't this it is wise to disallow urls in robots.txt for that we are simultaneously listing in the XML sitemap. Is it true that these are requirements for Google Shopping to have XML sitemap and rel alternate hreflang for every language/country combination?
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