Quick Question with SITEMAP help me out pls

Hi guys, I have a few questions about sitemaps from an SEO perspective. What should be included and excluded? For example, if my site is about gaming and includes pages such as 'About Us,' 'Terms and Services,' '/tags,' and '/category' in the sitemap, should I remove those? If yes, how can I remove them using Yoast? In other words, should the sitemap only include the homepage and posts, and author pages?

Include homepage, main content page, category pages, media files (if you upload things like gaming videos and such).

Exclude admin pages, duplicate and/or thin contents terms of service page, privacy policy page (These pages are necessary for legal reasons but do not add SEO value, so they can be excluded.)

From Yoast's Documentation on how to exclude pages from sitemap:

Exclude Specific Content:

Go to SEO -> Search Appearance.
Click on the Content Types tab.
For each content type (e.g., posts, pages), you can toggle whether you want them to appear in search results. If you turn this off, they will also be excluded from the sitemap.
You can also go to the Taxonomies tab to exclude tags and categories.
In the Archives tab, you can control the inclusion of author archives and date archives.

Click to expand...

Sitemap = What do you want to be indexed?

Gaming site, hm... Well, this typically means your main content pages like posts articles, and possibly category pages that group related content together.

All this depends on your website structure, we are all different, same goes for our sites and how we do things.

Always include your homepage your posts and articles since these are your main content and if you have important category pages that help users navigate your content include those too.

Generally, a good idea is to leave out "About Us" since they aren't crucial for SEO same goes for "Terms and Services", "tags" can create duplicate content issues so it's best to exclude those and only include "category" pages (if they are valuable for users and search engines).

Now, if I remember it correctly, as I was mostly using other plugins, if you're using Yoast to manage your sitemap go to your WordPress dashboard navigate to SEO, and then click on "Search Appearance".

Under the "Content Types" tab you can decide whether or not to include posts pages and media in your sitemap.

In the "Taxonomies" section you can manage categories and tags and turn off tags if you don't want them in your sitemap.

Here is a link you can follow for more details if I made any mistake when it comes to Yoast:
https://yoast.com/help/xml-sitemaps-in-the-wordpress-seo-plugin/

just noindex tags and pagination pages for categories and posts and you should be good to go,
you want these pages to be crawled but not indexed, they will help with crawlability of the websites and link juice distrubution to inner posts

Lawliet1996 said:

Hi guys, I have a few questions about sitemaps from an SEO perspective. What should be included and excluded? For example, if my site is about gaming and includes pages such as 'About Us,' 'Terms and Services,' '/tags,' and '/category' in the sitemap, should I remove those? If yes, how can I remove them using Yoast? In other words, should the sitemap only include the homepage and posts, and author pages?

Click to expand...

I would certainly include these pages, as Google will definitely crawl these pages.

Sure, I'd be happy to help you with your question about sitemaps!

A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages of a website and provides information about its organization and structure. It serves as a blueprint for search engines, helping them understand and index a website's content more efficiently.

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