#680 – Route 66 -> Exclude menu items of articles from sitemap

Hi!

Maybe it would be a good addition to the Route 66 extension to be able to exclude specific articles or menu items from the sitemap?

This could maybe be done by having Route 66 exclude items (menu and articles) that are set to 'no-index' from the sitemap generation? So when an item's robots setting is set to 'no-index / no-follow' it won't show up in the sitemap.

Kind regards,
Jip

Hi Jip,

You can select the categories or the menus you want to include in the sitemap, so it's effectively the same. Does this help? What's your case?

Checking each menu item during sitemap generation isn't very efficient. So probably the best way would be to add an option for exclusion.

We will consider this feature.

Thank you for feedback.

Regards

For some of our sites we have created a custom 404 page article. We would exclude this article form the XML. But we could add this article in a category and the use the 'include category' feature.

But may an option to 'exclude' article categories would be better. Because when new categories are added we need to add the to the include. I think that this might be overlooked by site admins.

So maybe create a choice to select 'exclude' or 'include' and then the category select?

You might then use the same way to select (include or exclude) menu items?

This would make the sitemap function more flexible.

Yes, we will consider this.

However, for your case, having an article used as 404 is not correct. It's a bad practice.
You should instead style the error page which will also send the correct response headers to Google and other search engines.

Regards

Hi Lefteris,
We do send the correct header response to Google because we altered the error page by adding in the content of the article we created. ( header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");

But we might consider using a custom HTML module for this. I that case it's not an article and won't show up in the articles XML.

I do think I am going back to the default Joomla error page I think ;-) It's working the way we have set it up, but I don't think it's the best solution any more. I thought it might me easy for website content managers to be able to edit the text of the eroor themselves. But no one actually does ;-)

The only thing I don't like about the default page is that visitors can't see any reference (like a logo or other styling) to the website they are looking for. But maybe I could do that using CSS and some javascript.

You can do anything you want in the error page. You even can load modules but it requires a bit different markup. You can always take a look at the official documentation: https://docs.joomla.org/Custom_error_pages

Regards

Thanks!

You are welcome.