frankmarks

This was resolved successfully. I had moved several fields incl. email from one field group to another and the field id had changed, but I had not updated it in the forms editor.

Thank you for clarifying Jan, the website you mentioned (see breadcrumbs!) also clearly says “Add-on” and hence I had assumed that this means the plugin is part of the WP Downloadmanager. Do you happen to know any other way to air my frustration about the vendor, using any official WP forum?? Thanks!

• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Yui.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by frankmarks.

ok, thanks

Thank you Brecht, that’s an important question:
for the post /url-preview-test-post/, I had added the VLP via a shortcode (block editor).

So what I’d like users to be able to do is to paste a simple URL in a BuddyPress post (they obviously don’t know about shortcodes) and have the VLP preview being generated and “automatically” and displayed in the front-end activity stream.

@auctollo thank you but I’ve of course seen that section and this setting is only related to the general WP categories. What I am asking to do is to exclude a specific product category or a URL / slug referencing such a category. If there’s a way to do that I am happy to learn ??

Thank you very much @feznizzle for your detailed answers and update. The fact that the plugin doesn’t obey the physical robots.txt is absolutely sobering, since I am struggling with the fact that Google Sitemap XML contains URLs I dont want there. Unfortunately, those URLs are not posts, but product URLs.. And there are hundreds of them and frequent changes, so that it doesn’t solve my problem by adding post/page IDs…

I would hope that the plugin team has a solution, which could be rather simple: upon any sitemap update, disregard URLs which fulfill a certain pattern, e.g. contain a certain phrase.

If there’s no solution soon, I will uninstall the plugin as it causes more pain than gain for me!!

Thank you all for your outstanding help, support and guidance, this was extremely helpful. Striving for an easy solution, I have decided to deactivate the sitemap function in YOAST SEO on all my sites, and replaced it with a different more configurable sitemap plugin, which does not constantly update the sitemaps and as a result, does not scoop up the temporarily uncategorized product URLs.

I was able to find the issue, which related to product updates in the background, leading to some products being uncategorized temporarily. Those uncategorized products were then submitted to Google via the sitemap on a constant basis. I was able to mitigate the issue by changing the sitemap tool, so the sitemap would not constantly update anymore.

A. Is there also a way to exclude an entire category, e.g. uncategorized in my example?
Yes, go to Products-Categories and click on Uncategorized. You can then edit the Yoast SEO Metabox in the Advanced section and apply a noindex tag to it. Google will then eventually drop that page off from the SERPs. This guide explains more: https://yoast.com/help/how-do-i-noindex-urls/#single

Hi @pcosta88 thanks for your message. When applying this to the “uncategorized” category, then the category page is noindex,follow: https://www.getraenkemarkt24.com/produkt-kategorie/unkategorisiert/
However, the individual product pages within that category are – unfortunately – still showing index,follow. Example here: https://www.getraenkemarkt24.com/produkte/unkategorisiert/frangelico-haselnuss-likoer-likoere-davide-campari-milano/

I would expect that if I assign a category to noindex, then all products within/under that category should be noindex as well. This would solve my entire problem instantaneously without adding any further PHP code.

@devnihil @mikes41720
I have an important follow-up question: is it possible to make the Yoast XML Sitemap update itself only once a day? This would likely solve the issue I described above entirely.
Thank you for your help, I appreciate it!
Best regards

@devnihil thank you. Is there also a way to exclude an entire category, e.g. uncategorized in my example?

@mikes41720 thank you for your message. When looking into the backend, all three products do not have any category, but are strangely also not assigned to the uncategorized category. I assume those 3 products are the result of an update error.

The main problem appears to be that there are temporary URLs listed in the sitemap, probably during the time when the affiliate product XML feed is being updated and new products are being added: the temporarily uncategorized products become part of the YOAST sitemap and thus become part of the Google Index in some instances, example: https://www.getraenkemarkt24.com/produkte/unkategorisiert/6er-aktion-jean-marc-lafage-la-operette-igp-2018-rotwein/

@devnihil thank you for your message, I have added the following code to my “Custom Code Plugin”. So far, the sitemap still contains some uncategorized URLs. Am I doing anything incorrectly here? (776 seems to be the ID of the uncategorized category)
Thank you, I appreciate your support!

function sitemap_exclude_terms( $terms ) {
    return [ 776 ];
}
add_filter( 'wpseo_exclude_from_sitemap_by_term_ids', 'sitemap_exclude_terms', 10, 1 );

function sitemap_exclude_taxonomy( $excluded, $taxonomy ) {
    return $taxonomy === 'unkategorisiert';
}
add_filter( 'wpseo_sitemap_exclude_taxonomy', 'sitemap_exclude_taxonomy', 10, 2 );

I’ve been digging a little deeper and have included further evidence and thought, which hopefully can be helpful to find the root cause of the issue.

1) The sitemap which is generated by YOAST and submitted to Google Search Console contains uncategorized product links. When accessing the sitemap today, I found that first there were about 80 uncategorized products, but then only 5 one hour later. Is it possible to prevent Yoast from including uncategorized URLs?

2) The Woocommerce product directory does show zero uncategorized products, but at some point during the product import process the product must have generated an uncategorized URL, which was at that point included in the sitemap.

3) Some of the “uncategorized” products AND show up properly categorized (!) when accessing the URL (PRODUKTE > WEIN > ROTWEIN > #Product#): https://www.getraenkemarkt24.com/produkte/unkategorisiert/6er-aktion-jean-marc-lafage-la-operette-igp-2018-rotwein/

4) Other products are NOT properly categorized when accessing the URL directly (here: Shop > Products > #Product#) https://www.getraenkemarkt24.com/produkte/unkategorisiert/inga-my-grappa-affinata-barrique-selection-02l-grappa/

Any ideas? I appreciate anybody’s thoughts.

Hello everyone, I am still trying to solve the problem described above. Any idea is highly appreciated. Best regards, Frank