Activation on dev site

Hello!

If you wish to receive private Premium support, you can always ask questions here: https://tsf.fyi/contact. We guide users to the public forums for public support so more people could benefit from our time spent writing, but we wouldn’t steer users to the forums who have already reached out to us privately (though there are select cases).

To answer your question, you can enable the sitemap while you are still developing the website. When search engines stumble upon it, they may start crawling the site entirely, but they’ll constantly face unindexable pages. This may cause them not to index your site as quickly once it goes public.

So, instead of discouraging search engines via WordPress’s Reading Settings, you may also want to set “noindex” for the entire site via “SEO Settings > Robots Meta Settings > Indexing.” This will remove all the pages from the sitemap (except those that are force-indexed).

When the site is ready to go public, untick those options and submit the sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

I hope this helps. Let me know if there’s anything else you have questions about. Cheers!

Alright mate thanks , I read that you should first direct to the contact page so here I was.

Great I noticed one checkbox to prevent the whole website to be indexable. So I think that’ll do the trick

However the sitemap is blank when the option’s checked. I believe that’s the purpose right? Cause are SEO expert asks us to provide one, while still preventing the dev website to be accessible, so I’m a bit stuck ??

Thanks a lot!

• This reply was modified 7 months, 2 weeks ago by ilwoody.

Howdy!

Ah, yes—I forgot about that checkbox. We kept getting spam messages so that toggle would sift out the dishonest people. We also have a special hidden form here that doesn’t use that psychological trick: https://premium.theseoframework.com/support/. Handling support for nearly 200,000 people takes a ton of time, but public forums go a long way in mitigating the effort.

But yes, the sitemap will be blank with the option checked (which was the intention). When new pages are added to the sitemap, search engines notice the changes immediately and start crawling the new pages. If your SEO expert needs to inspect it pre-launch, you could temporarily toggle the site-noindex state off.