As you all know, Webflow does not provide any configuration options for the sitemap. It’s either they generate one, which is always wrong, or you generate one and manually upload it anytime your site updates.
Not having basic options like excluding pages from the sitemap is unacceptable in my opinion. Not only because this seems like a much more important problem to solve than any of the features they’ve shipped lately, but also because a malformed sitemap is SEO death when it comes to Google. Having noindexed pages in your sitemap is a great way to never rank for anything.
My current workflow requires me to have the auto generated sitemap feature on so I can grab the new URLs. I could be publishing anywhere from 2-6 URLs every time I publish, which is multiple times per day. I then visit /sitemap.xml and grab the generated sitemap. I quickly go to a code editor and remove all the known URLs that should not be there. I then go back to Webflow and turn off the auto generated sitemap, and upload my corrected version.
As you can see, doing this multiple times per day is an incredible waste of time.
Has anyone found a better workaround? I really do not want to move off of Webflow, but it feels like they’re uninterested in fixing these foundational problems. I’ve seen the wishlist. I’m not interested in voting on topics and waiting 3 years for nothing to happen. I need this problem fixed now.
We are also looking for a solution to the webflow sitemap.xml problems.
The auto-generated sitemap.xml causes the following issues in our situation, among others:
Noindex page in sitemap Missing reciprocal hreflang (no return-tag) More than one page for the same language in hreflang Hreflang annotation invalid
Maybe some of these problems are fixable in other ways - I’m looking into it right now.
The Noindex page in sitemap is an obvious problem - we have some pages that we’ve excluded using in the robots.txt-file. Webflow won’t remove them from the sitemap…
Creating a custom sitemap.xml is a last resort for us, due to maintenance costs as we scale. The whole point of Webflow is to automate these things.
I wish for a simple toggle on each page: “remove from sitemap”. I also wish for some control over hreflang in the autogenerated sitemap. Please webflow, prioritize this.