so basically from webflow answer, i can understand that we have 2 options and both are not helping:
The first is to auto generate sitemap and include no index and robots.txt pages (totally bad for SEO). OR
secondly, we can create a custom sitemap and upload it to the webflow root but every time we will update the site we will need to send it manually again to webflow root and then to google search console again?
seriously?
webflow official answer:
"It is not possible to exclude a page from the automatically generated sitemap. CMS Collection pages with no content in them will not be included in sitemaps by default.
I believe that’s a non-issue. Google uses sitemap simply as a guide to navigate your site more efficiently, it is not a directive on what to index. The meta noindex is what determines index state, not the sitemap.
If you did manual ( but, why ), yes you’d have to updated it each time you changed your site page structure.
No you would not need to resubmit it. Once Google has it, it rechecks it regularly.
From what I recall, GSE will continue to show a warning or error for urls in sitemap that are not indexable, which is annoying because as GSE admins we’ll always have to see them and won’t get a clean alert for actual issues.
Hi Jonas, since this original post, WF has made some changes-
You can now configure any static page to be suppressed from search engine indexing. It adds a meta noindex tag, and removes it from the sitemap.
Paginated collection lists now show the paginated URL as the canonical for each page, so they’re individually indexable.
The scenario described by OP is no longer an issue with the possible exception of special cases where someone wants to exclude all pages in a specific collection, or an individual CMS page. I use a reverse proxy for those situations.
How to update the URL’s in the Sitemap if i have redirected those URL’s. I am using auto generated sitemap but the sitemap has the old Path of the URL’s, how to add the new URL’s? will it get updated automatically?
The URLs in an auto-generated sitemap will always list your actual static page paths and CMS item page paths.
It will not change anything regarding redirects.
If you have a static page at /test, and you have a redirect from /test to /test2 then;
Your auto-generated sitemap will show /test
Users who visit /test will be redirected to /test2
Normally if you’re trying to make Test 2 the formal location for your page, you change the slug to test2 and have your /test → /test2 redirect to route people who try to access the old path.