How to exclude content from the sitemap

Posts and pages can be assigned to multiple taxonomies and thus may unexpectedly show up in your sitemap when you thought they would be hidden. You can exclude individual posts or pages from the sitemap inside the metabox in both Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Premium, or exclude certain content types by customizing the sitemap index.

  1. Log in to your WordPress website.

    When you’re logged in, you will be in your ‘Dashboard’.

  2. Edit the post or page.

    On the left-hand side, you will see a menu. In that menu, navigate to the post or page (or other custom post type) you’d like to exclude.

  3. Expand the ‘Advanced’ section and change the ‘Allow search engines to show this Post in search results?’ to ‘No’ for this post or page.

  4. Publish or update the post or page.

Use a filter to bulk exclude posts or pages

You or your developer can also use a filter to bulk exclude posts or pages from the Yoast SEO sitemap. The filter would be placed in your functions.php file. If you’re not sure where that is, please contact your theme developer. As a best practice, we recommend making a backup prior to editing theme files. 

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