html to php to https

I have had this website for 20 years. Several years ago, I migrated from html to WordPress. I found that many external links to the site were lost because they did not link to the WordPress page. So I created a .html page with a redirect to the new WordPress page. That seemed to work.

But then Google indexed those redirect pages and saw them as duplicates of the WordPress pages. So I put a line in robots.txt to ‘Disallow: /*.html$’. That worked.

Now with the push to https, I upgraded and found that the Google ‘Coverage’ of my website has dropped to zero since my http pages disappeared, replaced by https.

So I created a new Google Search Console for my property as https. I am having problems creating a proper sitemap. I can create one manually. I have also tried to use Google XML Sitemaps but it seems to be submitting only my redirecting html pages, since all I get from Google is ‘page submitted is blocked by robots.txt’. I have just deactivated Google XML Sitemaps.

At this point, I could just manually create a sitemap using a sitemap generator, then edit out the .html pages. I guess I would put that in the root directory of the website.

Any suggestions on how to get me out of this loop of problems that I have caused?

• This topic was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by thehammer610.

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