noindex,follow in xml sitemap x-robots-tag

Are you referring to the actual sitemap_index.xml URL that shows the sitemap or you’re referring here all the URLs that listed in the XML sitemaps generated by Yoast SEO?

/sitemap_index.xml (X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow)
/post-sitemap.xml (X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow)
/page-sitemap.xml (X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow)
/product-sitemap.xml (X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow)
/product_cat-sitemap.xml (X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow)
/product_tag-sitemap.xml (X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow)

This is to be expected to see the actual sitemap URLs to set as noindex,follow as you don’t want search engines to show the sitemap URLs in the search results. All you want is to let search engines crawl all the URLs from the sitemaps and show them in the search results but not the sitemap URLs.

I understand that. But according to Google eventually tag noindex,follow turns into noindex,nofollow and the search engines will stop crawl the URLs from the sitemaps.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by alexzubovich.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by alexzubovich.

Hi,

Sitemaps are expected to be exempt from this, as it is a special file type. Even if a sitemap has a noindex tag on it, Google will still follow the links on the sitemap. This guide explains more: https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/