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Margaret670

: Sitemap.xml approach on non-indexed site On a site that has a robots.txt file that disallows all crawling... User-agent: * Disallow: / ...does it matter what the sitemap.xml content is? Is it

@Margaret670

Posted in: #Indexing #Noindex #Seo #Sitemap

On a site that has a robots.txt file that disallows all crawling...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /


...does it matter what the sitemap.xml content is? Is it better, or does it make a difference at all, if requests to sitemap.xml return a 404, a 403, or an empty XML file?

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@Shanna517

In contrast to robots.txt, the sitemap doesn’t have a fixed name/location.

You could name it "s" instead of "sitemap.xml". And it doesn’t have to be placed in the host root. See www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location.
So it’s likely that search engines wouldn’t try to guess if there is a sitemap (or, if they would try it, they can’t expect to find something). There are various ways to inform search engines about your sitemap location.

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@Murphy175

From support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might
not otherwise discover.


This means you don't need a sitemap if you don't want Google to discover anything. Having a sitemap won't do anything so I wouldn't make one at all.

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