Google’s John Mueller mentioned it’s acceptable to limit entry of your XML Sitemaps to simply search engines like google and yahoo. So you may technically block people from seeing your XML sitemaps however permit Google to entry it.

This got here up when Christoph Cemper requested about some websites utilizing Cloudflare to limit entry to their XML sitemap recordsdata. Christoph requested “Seen an xml sitemap “protected” by .
Cloudflare. Questioning if Googlebot would kind in that Captcha, or simply retry later, or simply ignore the map. Any experiences/steering @JohnMu on such a case?”

John responded on Twitter saying “That is positive. These sitemap recordsdata are for search engines like google and yahoo, and a few websites want to limit their entry accordingly.”

Listed here are these tweets:

That is positive. These sitemap recordsdata are for search engines like google and yahoo, and a few websites want to limit their entry accordingly.

— 🐝 johnmu.xml (private) 🐝 (@JohnMu) June 6, 2022

I assume it relies on what you are attempting to do. If you don’t need random folks crawling your sitemap, then by all means block all of them.

— 🐝 johnmu.xml (private) 🐝 (@JohnMu) June 8, 2022

This could clearly not be a type of cloaking as a result of people don’t must see your Sitemap recordsdata, as a result of XML sitemap recordsdata are designed for search engines like google and yahoo, not people. However this clearly wouldn’t apply to HTML sitemap recordsdata…

Discussion board dialogue at Twitter.