Remove specific urls from sitemap

Hello!

Thank you 🙂

I’m unsure why you would go through the hassle of maintaining another sitemap.

Nevertheless, you need to use a filter to remove indexable posts from the sitemap.

When you have a standard list of IDs you wish to exclude, the best thing is to forward all those IDs at once via the_seo_framework_sitemap_exclude_ids.

I’m not sure what you mean by “apply the exclusion to a specific category,” is it all posts in the category, the category itself, or something else?

Considering you wish to exclude all posts with a specific category, this snippet should help:

add_filter(
	'the_seo_framework_sitemap_exclude_ids',
	function( $ids ) {

		$my_exclude_ids = get_posts( [
			'post_type' => 'post',
			'fields'    => 'ids',
			'tax_query' => [
				[
					'taxonomy' => 'category',
					'field'    => 'term_id',
					'terms'    => 42,
				],
			],
		] );

		return array_merge( $ids, $my_exclude_ids );
	}
);

In that snippet, you see the number 42 — you should change this to the ID of your category. When you edit a category, you can see in your browser’s URL bar tag_ID=42, which you should take the number from.

(Where do I place filters?)

I hope this helps! Cheers 🙂

Hi Gauthier,

Sitemaps pose no benefit to ranking, they only speed up indexing. Generally, visitors never see the sitemap, only search engines. I firmly believe that optimizing the sitemap beyond the capabilities of The SEO Framework (or WordPress) is futile: https://tsf.fyi/kb/sitemap.

I’m not sure why you rewrote my tested code. I marked all issues in // comments below:

add_filter(
	'the_seo_framework_sitemap_exclude_ids',
	function( $ids ) {

		$my_exclude_ids = new WP_Query( array( // Why have you change this? I tested my code before I sent it to you.
			'post_type' => 'page', // Post type "page" doesn't have taxonomies by default, so a 'tax_query' won't work.
			'tax_query' => array( // Why use an archaic form of array() instead of the easier to read and write []?
				array(
					'taxonomy' => 'post_Tag', // should be post_tag. Everything is case-sensitive. But you wrote "category" in your initial request...? post_tag are also for post, not page.
					'field'    => 'tag_id',   // should be term_id
					'terms'    => 179,
				),
			),
		) );

		return array_merge( $ids, $my_exclude_ids );
	}
);

Hi again!

How are the pages and post tags related, and how is this achieved? Once we know that, we can figure out a way to exclude them.

Still, if you have indexing issues, it seldom is because of the sitemap but a problem with the website. Think of faulty robots-tags, canonical URLs, interlinking, thin content, spam, “manual actions” (penalties), etc.