How to Exclude a Post Type From Yoast Sitemaps

On a WordPress site, a post type is a category of content, such as posts, pages, or a custom type. Yoast SEO creates an XML sitemap, a file that lists URLs for search engines, and puts each content type’s URLs in a separate sitemap file.

To remove an entire post type from Yoast’s sitemap, turn off that type’s Show in search results? setting under Yoast SEO → Settings → Content types. Yoast then removes the type’s sitemap from the sitemap index and sets its content to noindex, which tells search engines not to include those pages in search results. As Yoast explains in its sitemap settings documentation, this setting controls both search visibility and sitemap inclusion.

Turn off search visibility for the post type

In WordPress, open Yoast SEO → Settings → Content types, select the post type you want to exclude, and turn off Show [type] in search results? Save the setting. The label uses the name of the content type, so a custom type might appear as “Show Projects in search results?”

Yoast uses this setting to decide whether search engines should include the content type in search results. When you turn it off, Yoast marks the type’s content noindex and leaves it out of the XML sitemap, as its sitemap guidance explains. Because the setting applies to the whole post type, check that you want search engines to exclude all of its entries before changing it.

If the post type does not appear under Content types, Yoast says it may not be registered as public. Its documentation describes a developer filter, wpseo_sitemap_exclude_post_type, for excluding a type from sitemap output. A developer should test that approach against the site’s sitemap setup, especially if custom sitemaps use the same post type.

What changes in the sitemap index

The sitemap index is the main XML file that links to the site’s separate sitemap files. After you disable search visibility for a post type, its sub-sitemap link disappears from that index. Other links, such as those for pages, authors, categories, tags, or other taxonomies, remain if those sitemap types are enabled. Yoast describes these index entries in its sitemap index documentation.

The setting leaves the content published and keeps its URL unchanged. Yoast marks the post type’s content noindex and removes the type from its sitemap. The XML sitemap itself also carries an X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow header; that header applies to the sitemap file, not to the content URLs listed on the site.

Verify the change

Open your site’s sitemap index at /sitemap_index.xml and find the link for the post type you changed. Confirm that the link is gone and that sitemap links for other content types you expect to keep are still present. Yoast’s instructions for excluded content distinguish between excluding individual entries and excluding a whole content type.

If the post-type sitemap link still appears, confirm that you saved the correct setting and that you changed the intended content type. Then reload the index and check its XML contents. If the post type is absent from Yoast’s settings, use Yoast’s guidance for public post types or ask a developer to review the filter approach.

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