Noindex page in sitemap (blog categories and tags)

Hello,

I have toggled the Squarespace controls to ensure blog categories and tags are not indexed.

However now when I run the audit on AHREFs, it says "Noindex page in sitemap" and shows some of the categories and tags.

I resubmitted my sitemap on Google search console. How do I ensure these no index pages are completely removed from the sitemap?

Thanks

On 1/14/2023 at 2:31 AM, MadeForImpact said:

Hello,

I have toggled the Squarespace controls to ensure blog categories and tags are not indexed.

However now when I run the audit on AHREFs, it says "Noindex page in sitemap" and shows some of the categories and tags.

I resubmitted my sitemap on Google search console. How do I ensure these no index pages are completely removed from the sitemap?

Thanks

 

Hi,

Have you found it?

Same question here. I can't seem to find how to noindex tags and categories in settings.

Thanks

1 hour ago, TheSEOtog said:

I can't seem to find how to noindex tags and categories in settings.

@creedon Thank you. I've tried that yet they still show in the sitemap.

2 hours ago, TheSEOtog said:

I've tried that yet they still show in the sitemap.

The setting doesn't remove the pages from the sitemap. It adds a request to the pages that search engine crawlers no longer index them.

@creedon What's the point in feeding them to google in the sitemap? It can potentially be a waste of sites crawl budget.

14 minutes ago, TheSEOtog said:

What's the point in feeding them to google in the sitemap? It can potentially be a waste of sites crawl budget.

I'm not an SEO expert and I can't comment on why SS does anything it does.

In my view sitemap.xml although probably mainly used for search engines are not limited to that specific application.

I can see that it may be possible that a page that requests not to be indexed, i.e. don't present the page itself in search results, may still contain links to other pages that should be in search results. If the page is not there then it can't get crawled.

Other uses of sitemap.xml may benefit from knowing the structure of a site as long as they use the guideline to respect the noindex option, again don't present them in some kind of search result.

One idea of the noindex is to not present links as main entry points into a site that may dilute those main entry points. So in the case of a blog you may want folks to hit /blog but not /blog/category/dilution.

9 hours ago, emeliawest said:

If you have pages on your website, such as blog categories and tags, that you do not want to appear in search engine results, you can use the "noindex" tag to exclude them from being indexed by search engines.

There is no need to add tags for this purpose as SS already provides a way to do this.

Quote

If the page is included in your website's sitemap, you should also remove it from the sitemap. You can do this by editing your website's sitemap XML file and removing the URL for the page.

SS provides no method to edit the sitemap.xml file.

An average SS user would have no clue how to edit a sitemap.xml file. A round of applause to the SS seo team for this amazing user friendly seo feature.

@TheSEOtog If a sitemap didn't automatically update, you can ask SS support to kick it off. You shouldn't see those URLs after it updates.