#11421 – Sitemap issues

Hi

I have pages that are being included in the sitemap that should not be in that the page alias was wrong and then fixed the url was purged from the system but when I choose to regenrate sitemap it ends up back in the sitemap for some reason and can't figure out why.

That's not at all how this work, and what you are seeing is expected given what you describe. Here are the important point:

- "Rebuild sitemap" does not change the sitemap content. It justs litterally rebuild it based on the data in the Pages list

- The Pages list is the only thing that matters, it serves as an absolute reference for most things 4SEO does: figuring out which pages are canonical, which pages should be in the sitemap, etc

- The Pages list is build by the Analysis process

- The analysis process is constantly running. The analysis is permanent. The "Analyze now" button you likely used to get started is just a shortcut when a site is new

- If you have a page like /uncategorised/how-can-you-tell-if-a-rash-is-serious-2 and you change the URL to, say, /some-category/how-can-you-tell-if-a-rash-is-serious-2, that has no effect on the Pages list and that (old)  URL will still be in the sitemap.

- ... and the page /some-category/how-can-you-tell-if-a-rash-is-serious-2 will likely not appear in the sitemap because when 4SEO finds it (analysis is constantly running, so it will find it as long as there's a link to it somewhere), then this new URL for the same page will be considered a duplicate and therefore excluded from sitemap and will get a canonical tag to /uncategorised/how-can-you-tell-if-a-rash-is-serious-2

- if you change URLs for existing content (which you should not do from an SEO standpoint but can happen during development), the safest is to do a new analysis (ie Reset analysis then Analyze now)

then fixed the url was purged from the system but when I choose to regenrate sitemap it ends up back in the sitemap for some reason

Most likely 4SEO found a link to it somewhere on the site.

and then there are a bunch of important pages not being included.

Again, being in the sitemap is only a consequence of being on the Pages list. That's where you have to look. Chose one of these pages, find it in the Pages list and check that it's 

a - Canonical

b - Marked as to be included in the sitemap

For that to happen, you need:

- the page must be linked from somewhere on the site (the link should be a follow link, not one with nofollow attribute)

- it must not have a canonical tag point to another URL

- it must not be excluded by robots.txt, meta noindex

I'd suggest you provide me with one such URL to check on it but I'm pretty the root of all your issues is that you changed URLs but did not do a Reset analysis. And so old URLs are still there.

Of course, if you also have links to the old URLs, 4SEO will keep finding them (and so will Google as well).

I am wondering if there is a way to turn off 4seos sitemap and just put a manual one up there or if there is something I can do to fix this. Any help figuring this out is much appreciated.

You certainly can, just have to disable the sitemap handling in 4SEO sitemaps settings. Just understanding the problem is likely enough though. Problem with static sitemap generator is that they are static. But troubleshooting 4SEO operation here is likely to give more resilient results because 4SEO works just like Google, in its crawling so if you see pages that should not be there, or you don't see things that should be there, it's likely the same happen to search engines.
And then 4SEO is (can be) connected to the Search Console, and show you what Google knows about your site, including your sitemaps, so that's quite more important.

Side note: I see that your site has only a few dozens pages, so in any case, a sitemap is actually not needed at all! (Google documentation says sitemap are when you have more than 500 pages)

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr