Sitemap Customization Option

Ideas
1

When we create a website using ghost, it adds author pages and tag pages to the sitemap. It is possible to ask Google Bot and other Search Engine bots not to index those pages but Google Search Console complains because of sitemap entries.

There is no way to customize which pages needs to be added to the sitemap and which are to omitted.

Adding collection pages harms website’s SEO and I highly appreciate if you can provide a way to customize the sitemap.

Thanks

2

This is a great idea. It is crazy that we cannot currently customise the sitemap. We are being penalised for this in search console.

2 Likes
3

Why do collection pages harm SEO?

4

I encountered the same issue. The official Google support page only says what to do if you want the page indexed; doesn’t say what to do otherwise.

Here a third party says feeding non-indexable URLs to search engines, you’re sending them conflicting signals that leads to crawl budget waste which in turn is bad for SEO.

But another third party site mentions that it’s okay to ignore.

Nevertheless, search console prominently shows the noindex errors in red and I agree it might be better to have sitemap edits.

1 Like
5

@leonerdo @TomJP
I found a workaround to sort this out but you need to edit the sitemap generation files in the following path.

The steps

  1. Inside your ghost installation visit /current/core/frontend/services/sitemap/ path
  2. Edit manager.js and find createIndexGenerator() method
  3. Remove authors and tags from the types
    The commands
cd /current/core/frontend/services/sitemap/
vi manager.js (or nano manager.js)

The createIndexGenerator() method should look like,

createIndexGenerator() {
        return new IndexMapGenerator({
            types: {
                pages: this.pages,
                posts: this.posts
            }
        });
    }

Hope this helps

2 Likes
6

This would be very useful, and feels like a strangely missing feature that stops having proper control over SEO and keeping on top of GSC. I imagine adding sitemap rules in a way similar to Routes and Redirects would make a lot of sense, though any method of giving control over sitemaps to the user would be great.

1 Like