Sitemaps contain URLs whose pages do not exist.

Hi @usemybee,

Thank you for reaching out.

The link you are giving us is the author sitemap. Author pages are created by WordPress itself. If you don’t want/need the author sitemap, you can disable them from being created under SEO > Search Appearance > Archives (tab). We have some documentation on this here: https://yoast.com/help/how-to-exclude-author-pages-from-sitemap/.

Thanks to Jeroen Rotty for the answer. For these authors, I have disabled all the time.

This site works in the Amazon affiliate program. When I import products (books) from Amazon, the author’s information is also transferred. However, no author page is created. For these authors, I would like the URL not to be added to the sitemap.

Thank you for your reply.

If your affiliate program integration also imports authors, but there are no posts published by those authors, you can also enable the author sitemaps and exclude any author that has no published posts, that way only your user or any editor that has published posts on your site, will end up in the author-sitemap.xml. You can find this option under SEO > Search Appearance > Archives (tab) – Author archives → make sure this is enabled and then you configure the option Show archives for authors without posts in search results? to no.

Hope this helps.

Thanks to Jeroen Rotty for the answer. I tried this a few days ago, but the result was the same.

This setting seems to take into posts and pages, not products. Could this be a problem?

WordPress

Hi @usemybee,

Thank you for your reply!

The pa_author-sitemap.xml is not the same as author-sitemap.xml, I’m sorry for not catching that earlier.

This pa_author-sitemap is probably a custom product taxonomy or custom post type on your site. When we check your sitemap_index.xml, containing all sitemaps, there are quite a lot of sitemaps that start with pa_. We recommend you to check which taxonomies and archive pages you need and want to be indexed. We have some information on this on our help center too.

Hi @jeroenrotty

Thanks. You led me to a solution.

Maybe it will benefit someone else.

1. Log into your WordPress website. When you’re logged in, you will be in your ‘Dashboard’.
2. Click on ‘SEO’. …
3. Click on ‘Search Appearance’. …
4. Click on the Taxonomies tab
5. Find Product Author
6. Show Product Author in search results? –> No
7. Click ‘Save Changes’.

@usemybee Thanks for confirming that this has corrected it. We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved.