Simple Site – What Sitemap Options

Hello @joe-g

Yes, you can easily exclude Categories, Tags via under XML Sitemap Settings. If Template Location and Block Types are custom post types, you can also exclude them under Custom Post Type settings.

Also, exclusion doesn’t break your Sitemap or its Structure, just relevant links will be excluded from Sitemap.

Best regards

Thank you for the reply. My apologies for the delay responding. Not sure if I got an email notification about a reply.

Also, exclusion doesn’t break your Sitemap or its Structure, just relevant links will be excluded from Sitemap.

What relevant links would be excluded from the sitemap.

I guess what I don’t understand about sitemaps is how to create a sitemap, with only relevant links, in which Google Search Console does not report issues with items like 404 pages and pages marked “noindex” tags. I’m trying to keep my sitemap as simple as possible as the website is pretty simple.

Would it be possible to have a look at my sitemap settings and recommend which settings I should use and or which I could safely exclude.

Settings

Sitemap

Any advice or help appreciated.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by Joe G.

What I meant was that only excluded Pages, Posts and selected Category/Tag posts would be excluded (this is Pro Version feature about Excluding Categories, Tags, Posts, etc.). Therefore, unless you select any Exclude options, everything from your website will be included. In your settings, you’ve excluded only Categories from Sitemap, so all Posts will be included in your Sitemap

404 pages will not be included in the Sitemap. Additionally, if you are using the YOAST SEO plugin, Noindex pages/posts will be excluded from Sitemap. If you are using another plugin for Noindex settings, please let me know and we will release a compatibility update.

Your settings look fine. Could you clarify what problem you are facing? Maybe some links are not included in the sitemap or something?

Best regards

If you think my settings are okay then I’m okay. My issues at the moment I don’t believe are being caused by the sitemap. The issues show up in Google Search Console. Here’s a link to a screenshot of Google Search Console/Pages to show you what I mean.

For a furniture upholsterer/amateur webmaster the search console results are a bit daunting to figure out how to resolve. Most, if any, don’t seem to be affecting search my results.

I don’t have any “no index” specific plugins. What I’m using is WordPress based BoldGrid as the website builder which comes with it’s own suite of plugins. The BoldGrid plugin “Easy SEO” has the option to index or noindex and all my pages and blog posts are set to Index.

The issues in the screenshot are not related to the Sitema.. Each issue must be researched and fixed if it needs a fix. Some of the listed Reasons don’t need a solution, they are for information only. If you have pages that should be indexed but are blocked for the reasons above, you will need to troubleshoot the issue on a page-by-page basis.

Best regards

That’s what I figured. Thanks.