Hey all,
I have numerous pages on our website that I don’t want to feature in our sitemap. Long story short, these are certificates that we give to visitors who have completed a basic training on our website as a part of a marketing initiative.
Each page is auto-generated when they complete their training. However, we don’t link to these pages anywhere else: they just exist. Now they are showing up in our sitemap and analytics as orphaned pages.
How can I remove these pages from our sitemap?
By using a custom sitemap instead of relying on auto generation where you have no control. It’s a Bummer.
It’s crazy that there is a ‘hide’ from search engines checkbox, but then the page is still included on a sitemap. Same with a ‘thankyou’ page for a form.
@greywood - EDITED - The option to “exclude this page from site search results” only stops the page from being indexed by Webflow’s internal search. Does not affect bots since it does not add a meta tag to the page.
You have to manually add one if you want to restrict bots from indexing a page. Then it does not matter if it is in the sitemap.
Hi Jeff, yes it matter for SEO if you have a URL in your Sitemap that you are tagging as “noindex” in the meta robots tag, that make no sense, and Webflow should to take care on this things ASAP.
Since they provide custom code areas for pages and on each CMS template and custom sitemaps, you can do what is needed, just not with a switch. I doubt you will see any movement on this one but who knows. You can create an item in the wish list if one does not exist.
I’ve made my own sitemap and used meta tags to control indexing in this case. Not ideal but it works in getting technical items spot on at least.
I ran into exact same issue… I need pages to be published for data referencing in otherpages, but I don’t want actual pages to be visible (so I hide them with a password field). But those pages are still printed to the sitemap. Ignoring and hidding from the page search. I even added robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /companies/
That still did not help, Google is not happy.
@greywood how did you manage generating your own sitemap?
