Excluding pages from sitemap.xml

Everyone

How do I exclude a page from being listed in sitemap.xml ?

mad

Everyone Hi, unfortunately there is currently no option to exclude public pages from the pagelist.

Everyone

Actually the page in question is private. It's on the website for testing new content and ideas, yet it's still picked up for sitemap.

So I guess that makes it a feature request?

allow pages to be excluded from sitemap.xml
private pages are excluded by default

maybe with a switch in page's settings?

mad

Everyone Hey, actually it is a bug. 😩 Private pages will be excluded by default in the next release.

mad

Everyone Private pages are now excluded from the sitemap.xml.

Ivor

@mad waiting for when you can spend precious time on making the sitemap adjustable in the dashboard, what would be the preferred/required approach of adjusting the generation of the sitemap.xml? I am currently working on the website of my girlfriend, and she just has a landingpage. Took some time to figure out how to set it up, but I got a lot of pagelists which collect the children of a page. This results in a long list sitemap.xml, even though it actually should only have the main page. Any input is welcome on how to handle this case. I tried to change the sitemap.xml generation in the Automad core, but that did not seem to do anything (that being said, I don't know what triggers the generation...).

mad

Ivor Hi, the best practice would be to ad a redirect URL for all those children pages. That way also direct access will be prevented. All redirected pages with an URL that doesn’t begin with a / are excluded from the sitemap.

Ivor

mad Wow, amazing, that works!

Be aware for people trying to do the same: if you have used @{ url } throughout your theme/template, you need to replace that with @{ :origUrl }. If somebody would like to know how to setup a landing page with sections and stuff, let me know and I'll make a post on the forum here how I managed to do that. But for now: the sitemap.xml consist of exactly one entry, which is exactly what I want!

Oh, also: to refresh the sitemap, I had to visit my landingpage and after that refresh the sitemap.xml. I disabled the caching, because I suspect that that influences the generation of the sitemap. So: disabling caching (for just a bit), load the pages that you want to update, enabling caching again. Not sure if caching does something in regards to the sitemap.xml (I sure hope so), but this definitely worked for me.

Everyone

mad best practice would be to ad a redirect URL for all those children pages. That way also direct access will be prevented. All redirected pages with an URL that doesn’t begin with a / are excluded from the sitemap.

I'm noticing, that they are not excluded, but rather added with the redirected URL, which basically creates duplicate entries for the same URL. Is this a bug?

Everyone

Ivor If somebody would like to know how to setup a landing page with sections and stuff, let me know and I'll make a post on the forum

Ivor Please feel free to do so, I'm sure a lot of people, me included, would benefit from it.

mad

Everyone Hi, yeah. Hi have to take a look at it. Pages that have an URL that does not begin with / and therefore are relative should be excluded. Can you give an example for a duplicate URL?

Everyone

mad yes, please check out this page. It has three subpages (named How could this be possible?, Part of a bigger picture, Something in the way). All of them are being redirected to the parent page. When you'll look up the sitemap.xml, you'll see that the there are four instances with the same URL - one "correct" and three from the redirected subpages.

mad

Everyone Hey, can you give an example of the URL that is used in the redirection field?

Everyone

mad the content of the Redirect page to another URL field for all three pages is /blocks and that is set when clicking on the suggested input:

mad

Everyone Hi, yeah that’s what I meant with starting with a /. Can you quickly try if setting it to ../ is working for you?

Everyone

mad It certainly helps with duplicates in sitemap, but now I cannot display just those redirected pages with a pagelist block.

mad

Everyone I understand. I will take a look at it.