Request: Exclude pages from sitemap and set priorities manually

Hi @svtx, hope you are having nice weekend ?? It is not possible to set priority for pages manually and it is not currently planed. Reason being, sitemaps by themselves are becoming less important/relevant and by extension, priorities even more. You can read more in-depth, detailed reasoning here and here. However, if you believe we missed something, please share it with us — we are open to reasoning ??

If you want to exclude post, category, or CPT from your sitemap, you can use simple filter:

add_filter( 'the_seo_framework_sitemap_exclude_ids', 'my_sitemap_exclude_ids' );
function my_sitemap_exclude_ids() {
    $ids = 2; // Either a single integer
    $ids = array( 2, 3, 6, 10 ); // Or an array with integers
 
    return $ids;
}

If you are not sure how to use filters, here is a handy guide. Excluding stuff from sitemap doesn’t really hide your posts from search engines, so bear that in mind.

On the top of that, you can always use third party sitemap plugin, TSF automatically detects most popular sitemap plugins and disable out built–in sitemap (or you can disable it manually).

Thank you so much for your insightful reply @lebaux.

To add to it:

The noindex option:
If you want to exclude pages from the sitemap because you find them to be redundant, consider using the noindex option. You can find this option on every page that’s eligible for sitemap listing.
Note that using the noindex option will remove the page listing from SERP.

Converting Posts to Pages:
If you find that your service pages are important, consider converting them to Pages, instead of Posts.
Pages will receive a 0.9 sitemap priority; whereas Posts will get a decremental priority.
Also, Posts are considered opinionated and at the very least time-sensitive. Pages are considered factual and static. This is especially true on how TSF and its extensions generate the metadata. This means your service pages might get pushed down in SERP over time when they remain Posts.

Cheers ??

I thank you, for factually expanding my reply @cybr! Live and learn. To sum it up, sitemap priorities are the tiniest tinsiest SEO factor imaginable. It is realistically possible, that Google doesn’t give this factor any weight at all. So my honest recommendation would be to focus on content, or another off–page factor, like speed. We can expect even more mobile focus from Google this year, with the launch of mobile index and revamped speedtest, among others ??

Thank you very much for your replies, that filter is probably all I need then!

I wasn’t aware that sitemaps aren’t a thing anymore, I assumed as long G asks for them, they probably use them for something and I had this error displayed in the (new) Search Console yesterday, which made me jump a little:

https://pasteboard.co/H8adKF3.png

As for priorities, I would still sleep better knowing my products (not posts or pages) are prioritised they way I see fit but heck, I believe you ??

I wasn’t aware that sitemaps aren’t a thing anymore

They still are @svtx, but they are much less important than before. If you check out the links I posted in my fist reply to you, you can learn more. You should still submit your sitemap to google webmaster tools, as it helps index your web faster, especially if it is a new website.

I’m reading mostly opinion, tbh. We all have those! ??

Reading this thread leaves me nervous. I have posts that are priority 0.0 in the sitemap I just generated (not yet submitted to G) but they are “evergreen” content and my most trafficked. Won’t the low priority kill off my ranking??

Priorities are ignored.

we ignore those. It's essentially a bag of noise

— Gary 鯨理／?? Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) March 28, 2017

In fact, we could just as well remove them, like Yoast SEO did last year.

The sitemap doesn’t contribute to ranking, either.

Long story short: There’s no need to be worried about them.