Exclude tags and categories from sitemap.xml

The jekyll-sitemap plugin has a feature to exclude pages from sitemap.xml

I’d like to use it to remove tags and categories from the sitemap. However modifying _layouts files header with the sitemap: false was not successful. Still sitemap contains links to tags and categories pages.

According to jekyll-sitemap documentation _config.yml can have sitemap: false configured as well.

The problem is that I failed to apply sitemap exclusion using wildcards as shown by example. Both path: "tags/**" or path: "tags/**/*" were not able to prevent tags (and categories) pages to be listed in the sitemap.

However filtration works fine if no multiplier is set. Here is sample from my _config.yml.

# removing tags and categories pages from the generated sitemap.xml
defaults:
  -
    scope:
      path:            "tags"
    values:
      sitemap:         false
      noindex:         true
  -
    scope:
      path:            "categories"
    values:
      sitemap:         false
      noindex:         true

UPD noindex tag

noindex: true should be added to the defaults to exclude tags/* and categories/* pages from the indexing. However the problem is that the root /categories/index.html page does’t have the noindex tag despite the defaults configuration.

I had to copy the _layouts/categories.html to the local folder from the Minimal-mistakes scheme sources. Then I have adjusted the local copy of categories.html and appended noindex: true line to the layout header like below.

---
layout: archive
noindex: true
---
....

The _layouts/defaults.html file has been copied as well. I’ve modified the head section by adding check for .noindex value:

  <head>
    { % include head.html % } 
    {% include head/custom.html %}
    {% if page.noindex or layout.noindex%}
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
    {% endif %}
  </head>

Twitter Facebook LinkedIn