Basically, my site has a bunch of pages like Password Recovery, Sign Up, the page that says Thank you! after signing up, etc. Those pages obviously don't have any marketing stuff in them and aren't intended as the landing pages. Would it make sense to remove them from the sitemap.xml file?
Do you need to put links to pages like password recovery to the sitemap?
seo;sitemap;xml sitemap
You should add the URLs of your pages which you want to get crawled and indexed.Dont you want your password recovery page to get crawled/indexed? Then dont add it. (And if you want to disallow crawling of your password recovery page, add it to robots.txt; if you want to disallow indexing of your password recovery page, use noindex; dont use both).Should you want your password recovery page to get crawled/indexed? I would say yes. Some users might want to use a search engine to find this page (instead of visiting your site and finding a link to the page). But this is primarily a usability question, it doesnt affect SEO much.The same goes for the sign up page. Your Thank you pages ideally wouldnt exist in the first place (youd typically display the message on the same page, or on the otherwise existing page you get redirected to after submitting the form), but if you need them, they would be good candidates for pages that shouldnt get added to the sitemap. And you should noindex them, too.