Hi @dan00neuffer,
Thank you for reaching out!
Your assumption is correct that when you mark a post or page not to be indexed in the search results, it should no longer be found in your sitemap.
We checked your post-sitemap.xml and do see the /michelle-interviews-dan/ is still in there. When looking at the Date modified, we see an old date.
Can you please try to temporarily disable the XML sitemap feature under SEO → General → Features (tab) and then re-enable them and see if that works? If not, are you running any caching plugin on your site?
If the issue persists and you are not using a caching plugin (or cleared cache and didn’t help), can you please confirm that all plugins, themes, and WordPress is up to date?
Hi
So that’s confusing – I have checked it in several browsers and it’s definitely there. I cleared the cache of the website and my browsers, no difference.
Did you search the word ‘michelle’ in your browser window when looking at the post-sitemap.xml?
I also turned the xml sitemap feature off and on again, made no difference.
I triple checked (just in case I am being daft) – the page is absolutely 100% set to “No” in the advanced settings.
I then disabled all caching at all levels – cleared all browser caches, no change.
Can you double check and see if you can see the post in the list? I have tried other posts as well, same issue.
Hello @dan00neuffer
We checked on your post and can confirm you’ve outputted a noindex & nofollow tag with the Yoast SEO plugin, so we would expect that it would be removed from the post sitemap as well. It’s still showing in the post sitemap. Could you please try to check and refer to this article if it would be of any help — https://yoast.com/help/sitemap-does-not-update/
I tried all that.
I even had the whole caching completely turned off, turned it off and had no sitemap and when I turned it back on, those false ones still show!
@dan00neuffer is it possible there could be some sort of server-level cache you could check? We checked on this post https://cfsunravelled.com/michelle-interviews-dan/ and ran it through the SEObook Tools server header checker and it did indicate that there was some sort of cache:
< Cache-Control: max-age=0
Perhaps you could check on this further?
Yes there is caching.
However, given that I had turned off the plugin and had no sitemap at all, surely it should be rebuild?
I cleared all my caches and had even turned them off and they sitemap still didn’t rebuild correctly.
I then turned the caches back on so that my website functions, because I felt it was established that caching wasn’t the issue. Is my logic flawed?
What am I missing?
I think I worked it out.
The issue was that I also had a page with the same URL. Somehow this was mixing up and even though the post was turned off.
