Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math today.
I am not sure to fully understand your question. Setting content as no-index will tell Google to don’t index it, meanwhile adding the content to the sitemap will let Google find it (and hopefully index it). So it is opposite actions. Could you give me more details about your question?
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
Thanks, Alberto. That answered my question. We wanted to remove some of the links that were indexed on Google. So setting no-index would remove them. I hope. We had a doubt whether Sitemaps are a zone for the Google bots to index the pages from and not wander outside of it during the crawl.
Hello,
Sitemap is more of a list of items to show the crawler what to crawl on your site. Items set to noindex are end up removed/excluded from the sitemap. Please note that if the URLs were already indexed and appearing on SERPs, it might take sometime for them to disappear but eventually they do.
Hope that helps. If you have any further question(s), please let us know. Thank you.
Thanks, Michael.
Now I am confused by both of the answers. If sitemap is submitted, do I need to do anything more so that Crawler stops indexing the other pages that are not in the sitemap that was provided to Google Search Console?
Hello,
The pages won’t be indexed, just the page data that was previously cached on google may take sometime to be removed automatically.
If you don’t wish to index the URLs again in future, you can request URL removal on Google.
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
Thanks for the help, Michael.
If you don’t wish to index the URLs again in future
So are you saying that Google will continue indexing the pages outside the sitemap zone?
Hello,
No. If they are not included in your sitemap, they will be no longer indexed.
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
