We have used empty external (href=”#”) links in our sitemap in order to group pages together in categories to enable drop-down of them in the site navigation when you hovered over the link. This enabled us to maintain proper seo structure of the site, i.e. home (tier1) –> sub page (tier2) –> sub sub page (tier3) and group pages together for visual representation to the users in the site navigation. The external link was not seen as a page.

This worked perfectly when our site was monolingual, i.e. the empty external link was ignored in the sitemap.

We have recently added two extra languages using the international language module (see screenshots). The structure of the site is:

Home
-/us/external link/sub pages
-/de/external link/sub pages
-/fr/external link/sub pages

Unfortunately, the empty external links mess up the site structure. Pages not grouped under external links are not affected though.

Structure:
mysite.com/us/external-link/sub-page
mysite.com/us/contact-us

mysite.com/de/external-link/sub-page
mysite.com/de/contact-us

mysite.com/fr/external-link/sub-page
mysite.com/fr/contact-us

Becomes:
mysite.com/sub-page
mysite.com/us/contact-us

mysite.com/sub-page1
mysite.com/de/contact-us

mysite.com/sub-page2
mysite.com/fr/contact-us

The language locale is drop from the path and same sub pages get sequence numbers added to their path. Any suggestions on how this can be fixed?