We have Collections Lists where the Publish settings are toggled to off. However, with Webflow’s latest enhancement to allow individual Collection Items to be excluded from sitemap indexing, all of the CMS items publish settings are toggled on.
I assume if the Collection List settings are toggled to off then the items won’t be indexed even if they are toggled as on. But I don’t feel good about that assumption. I’ve reached out to Webflow but wasn’t sure if anyone had determined the answer to this one way or another.
If the collection page itself is not published then there are zero collection pages, thus no need for a META noindex, and no content in the sitemap. You’d switch this off when you literally do not want the pages to exist on your site at all.
If the collection page is published then ALL pages are published live on the site, and exist in the sitemap EXCEPT
You now have granular control at the item level, within the CMS, and can individually exclude CMS items from the sitemap and from indexing ( META noindex ).