Sitemap - too many categories - how to clean up?

Having an issue with the sitemap generation - it lists every possible category/subcategory variant.
Even though the "real" categories are already marked as "canonical", and Google seems to be seeing them properly, this still creates an unholy mess in the sitemap.

For example, I don't want to see URLs like this in the sitemap:

http://www.mysite.com/products/subcateg ... large-blue
http://www.mysite.com/products/subcateg ... large-blue
http://www.mysite.com/products/subcateg ... large-blue
http://www.mysite.com/products/onsale/p ... large-blue

I only want to see http://www.mysite.com/products/product34-large-blue or, better yet, http://www.mysite.com/product34-large-blue

How can I exclude categories and subcategories from the sitemap? Either editing the core files, or an extension that lets you control sitemap generation on that level (include/exclude categories, and specify how "deep" you want the URLs to be), would work.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Default Sitemap extension is very weak and doesn't allow any customization. You can get full control over you sitemap with Smart Sitemap extension.

You can see, how it works on demo. See the description for more information on how to access demo.

Thanks for the tip - seems to be the most customizable sitemap extension currently available.

Please confirm though - it will allow me to specify that I don't want to see a "remix of every possible subcategory", or at least delete them from the semi-final results, before it generates the final sitemap?

tjonnyc wrote:Please confirm though - it will allow me to specify that I don't want to see a "remix of every possible subcategory", or at least delete them from the semi-final results, before it generates the final sitemap?

You can define only the categories, you want to have in your sitemap. Hell, you can even define a single products! And yes, of course, all these settings will be respected in final sitemap.

Regardless of what you put in the sitemap, as soon as a spider hits your page, it is going to go a wandering around on other pages.

** Unless you also put some kind of guidance in the robots.txt file (and/or) some kind of noindex in the page header of pages you don’t want indexed.

uksitebuilder wrote:Regardless of what you put in the sitemap, as soon as a spider hits your page, it is going to go a wandering around on other pages.

** Unless you also put some kind of guidance in the robots.txt file (and/or) some kind of noindex in the page header of pages you don’t want indexed.

Yes, exactly. Ideally, it all comes to setup of XML sitemap, robots.txt and .htaccess.