Update XML Sitemaps

@entmediatech

We understand that you’ve set around 26K poosts to “noindex” and they got removed from the sitemaps. Indeed, each chunk of listed sitemaps (like post-sitemap2.xml, ..-3.xml, ….-4.xml, …) should also be removed from the sitemap list. We see this is not happening in your case. To confirm, could you please let us know how you’ve set the meta to noindex for all those posts? Is it programmatically or via the Yoast SEO settings?

Sorry to hear that you’re still having trouble. Since none of the mentioned steps worked for you, we recommend you please add the following code snippet to your currently active theme functions.php file to see whether this resolves the issue for you:

add_filter( 'wpseo_sitemap_index_links', 'remove_empty_sitemaps', 10, 1);

function remove_empty_sitemaps( $links ){
	foreach ( $links as $sitemap => $value ){
		if ( ! $value['lastmod'] ){
			unset( $links[$sitemap]);
		}
	}
	return $links;
}

Please note that might need to modify the code snippet based on your site. It is highly recommended that you take a full backup of your website before applying the relevant code snippet.

The relevant code snippet and further discussion about the issue can be found here: https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/16771

We hope this helps!

@entmediatech Thanks for your reply and we’re sorry to hear that you are still experiencing the issue with the blank sitemaps after implementing the code snippet.

Regarding your question, a snippet such as this does typically work when added via the Code Snippet plugin. However, if you are experiencing problems with it working in the expected manner, we would recommend also trying it by including it directly within your site’s functions.php file.