hello all, I am in the process of launching a new site in which I have used the cms:calendar tag to implement an events calendar.

I use www.xml-sitemaps.com to generate xml sitemaps and was surprised when I reached the limit of 500 pages! The site is only quite small!

Anyway, what is happening is that it is following links within the cms:calendar loop somehow and recording loads of pages suffixed like this ....

?cal=2025-06-01

?cal=2006-04-01

I can manually edit the sitemap obviously to get rid of all these.

But am just wondering if this has implications for robots accessing the site ... will they too find these 'ghost' pages?

Any thoughts anyone? Perhaps I need to put something in the robots.txt file ....??

[KK]

Hi potato,

will they too find these 'ghost' pages?

Well strictly speaking, these are not 'ghost' pages - these are real, valid pages each showing a different month (unique content). It is just that the pages happen to have no real value for our site (as they cover a future time-period we are not interested in).

So, IMHO, no negative SEO implications but it won't be a bad idea to make the search bots skip such pages (using robots.txt or robots meta tag).

As for the tool you are using (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/), I couldn't spot any setting to make it exclude certain pages so I think you'll have to do it manually.

That said, I wonder why you are not using Couch itself to dynamically generate the sitemap? Will save you the hassle of recreating the sitemap when pages get added/deleted. Any reason in particular?

P.S. I found another sitemap generation service that does allow skipping pages with certain querystring parameters in them - https://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/sitemap-generator.aspx
Perhaps you could try using this one instead.

thanks @KK - I am using the calendar on a dedicated calendar page and a small version on the Home page - so because I needed to keep SEs out of only part of the page on the Home page I have now added

Code: Select all

rel="nofollow"

to the next/prev month links. Should have thought of that earlier!

Yes I need to revisit the Couch method of generating the sitemap - my sites are usually fixed in size in terms of main pages so I have veered away from it ...