HTML Sitemap Showing Empty Category

#515393
  • Resolved Drew

    2 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hello,

    I am trying your HTML Sitemap feature for the first time and have run into a couple issues. The sitemap is currently showing a category that has no posts (Uncategorized) even though I have Include Empty Terms disabled. I would prefer to NOT have the Uncategorized category link showing on that page. How can I accomplish that?

    The other thing is that I did create a new page /sitemap but when I went to select Page in the HTML Sitemap settings none of my pages were populating to choose from. For now I have chose shortcode, but am wondering what the point of the Page option is if it doesn’t work.

    Thanks!
    Andrew

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Nigel

    2 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math business

    Hello

    Thanks for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

    HTML sitemap shows all the categories. The option “Include Empty Terms” if disabled only affects XML sitemap. You can check the XML sitemap by visiting https://www.domain.com/?sitemap=1. To remove uncategorized category, you can add the ID in Rank Math > Sitemap Settings > General – Exclude Terms. You can read more about how to find the ID and steps here https://rankmath.com/kb/configure-sitemaps/#exclude-terms

    For the other part, if the page is not populating after entering the page title in search box, then it might be due to Javascript issue. You can read about how to find the Javascript issue by going to: https://rankmath.com/kb/meta-data-not-saving/#js-errors
    Or, if there’s any plugin conflict, we’ve an article which details out on how to find the plugin conflict: https://rankmath.com/kb/check-plugin-conflicts/

    Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have questions.

    Thank You

    Drew

    2 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Thanks for the response! I think we both would agree that having an empty page on the HTML sitemap is not good SEO – bots don’t like that you know. 🙂 Although the opportunity to easily add a HTML sitemap is great it would be even greater if we had the ability to ensure the bots didn’t end up going to empty links. So can we please come up with a solution to exclude those from the HTML sitemap? Not to mention no one should be using Uncategorized anyway – I wish WordPress would just let us delete it.

    Md. Sakib Khandaker

    2 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math agency

    Hello,

    You may set noindex to those empty categories to exclude them from both XML and HTML sitemap. This will also prevent search engines from indexing those empty categories.

    Hope that helps, and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.

    Thank you.

    Drew

    2 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math free

    That works for me, thanks for the suggestion!

    Md. Sakib Khandaker

    2 years, 11 months ago

    Rank Math agency

    Hello,

    We’re glad that we could address your concern.

    Please feel free to reach out to us again in case you need any other assistance.

    We are here to help.

    Thank you.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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