Excluded Pages Not Saved

A couple more things I noticed. First, I tried using the latest version of IE in wp-admin. That did not help.

Second, when I add the exclude ID and turn off dynamic sitemap and click update that seems to work. (save for the stylesheet problem above)

However, as soon as I turn dynamic sitemap back on and click update sitemap, I tell it to delete the static .xml and .gz and reload the sitemap and notice that excluded page is back. If I navigate away and back to the xml sitemap settings again, I notice that the excluded ID is again missing from the excluded pages field. I hope that helps you, but I am going to stick with the unstyled static until webmaster tools says its a problem.

Hi apcpub,

First, the unstyled sitemap isn’t a problem for Google, it’s only for having a slightly prettier presentation to humans. Have you tried adding a page id to exclude under “Excluded Pages” on the Sitemap settings page, or are you just checking the “Exclude From Sitemap” box on a particular page? After you do this, does the id not show up in the field? Because if so, that shouldn’t happen, nothing should change your settings after the fact, unless perhaps you have an issue with a caching plugin or a conflict with another plugin or with your theme.

I was trying to add a page ID under “Excluded Pages” in the settings. The results of that test in a nutshell were:

With dynamic sitemap generation checked:
Would not save new page ID (already some there from before upgrade)
https://example.com/sitemap.xml styled OK
https://example.com/sitemap.xml styled OK

With dynamic sitemap generation un-checked:
Saves new page ID OK
https://example.com/sitemap.xml blank page style missing
https://example.com/sitemap.xml styled OK

I was unaware of the checkbox feature to exclude on each page. So, I did some testing of that too because if that worked, and also didn’t ping search engines, that would be really cool. Unfortunately, that gave me problems too. Here are the results of that test:

As Administrator, with dynamic sitemap gen:
Checkbox saved OK
looked at https://example.com/sitemap.xml
styled OK
page excluded OK

As Administrator, with static sitemap gen:
Checkbox saved OK
looked at https://example.com/sitemap.xml
blank page NOT styled
page NOT excluded (looking at page source)
ls -la /public_html reveals sitemap.xml not regenerated

As Editor, with dynamic sitemap gen:
Checkbox NOT saved
looked at https://example.com/sitemap.xml
styled OK
page NOT excluded

As Editor, with static sitemap gen:
Checkbox NOT saved
looked at https://example.com/sitemap.xml
blank page NOT styled
page NOT excluded (looking at page source)
ls -la /public_html reveals sitemap.xml not regenerated

If you aren’t seeing this, I can try to look for conflicts. I don’t think its the caching because its configured to not cache the sitemap. I know its not the firewall because I have been watching the logs during my tests.

Hi apcpub,

Thanks for testing this. With the static sitemap, it has to pick either http or https to load the .xsl file, so one of those two URLs may be unstyled depending on the policies on your website (i.e., https page failing to access http resource). Also yes, I would suggest changing these settings as an Administrator, it sounds like you got dynamic sitemap generation working there. I’ve tested locally and I can’t reproduce your problems with either exclude from sitemap feature, with dynamic or with static sitemaps.