XML Sitemap without information

Hi Miguelonx,

Are you sure you want to remove all products, their tags, attributes and their categories from Google? That’s what the “noindex” option on the SEO settings page does. This will effectively negate all SEO optimizations from your site.

And, are you sure you want to index all attachment pages? They provide no content, they will effectively drop your site’s value.

For your site, I recommend these settings:

I also recommend disabling “nofollow” on all pages. They will negate the internal linking structure on your site, which makes it hard for robots to crawl your site.

The robots settings are very advanced options, and in general, they shouldn’t be altered from their defaults.

In any case, terms aren’t included in the sitemap. TSF only includes singular posts, like pages, posts, and products.

I believe you’ve applied “noindex” to many other pages, too. Singular posts with “noindex” applied are removed from the sitemap.

Hi Mike,

There’s no need to go into the database and alter things there.

As this is an edge case, I’m afraid I need to perform a closer inspection of what’s happening.

Could you send the URL of your website to me? If you wish to keep it confidential, you may send it via my contact page.

In the meantime, could you go to this URL on your website and hit “Guardar cambios” at the bottom? It’ll clean up the junk left behind from deactivating plugins:
/wp-admin/options-permalink.php

Hi Mike,

I received your mail well. The issue you’re experiencing has likely to do with the theme you’re using, every dynamic sitemap implementation will break because of it. I’ve sent a reply back with more details.

As a side note: The sitemap doesn’t contribute to ranking; pages rank on their own.
From an older support inquiry:

Please note that the sitemap doesn’t contribute to ranking, nor does the sitemap influence whether a page gets crawled or not. It’s a tool that’s slowly becoming deprecated.

No categories, tags, or other terms are placed in the sitemap, including those of WooCommerce. The inclusion was planned, but there are various important reasons it never got implemented.

[Most importantly,] It’s very difficult to determine when they’re last updated: terms change whenever you publish or update a new child post, and it then depends on your theme how and if they’re shown.
So, this requires us to do multiple database queries for each of the terms we’d like to include, and even then we could send out the wrong information.

In short, if we’d want to do this right it’ll lead to slow performance and a lot of maintenance for something that’s ultimately ignored by search engines.

Hi @miguelonx,

I just sent a mail back. I hope to get a reply ASAP because there’s a serious configuration issue.

For future reference:
The robots settings are extremely powerful. The settings are advanced tools to direct (force) Google and other search engines to disavow their default behavior and to remove your pages from their indexes.

They can negate all SEO, and they can seriously harm your website when used incorrectly.

The sitemap of The SEO Framework closely follows these rules, so to prevent crawling issues and errors.

I urge everyone to stay clear of the robots settings unless you truly know the effects of these. I’m going to add bigger warnings next to these settings in future updates.