Thank-you pages and old slugs should leave the sitemap

A sitemap is a list of pages you ask to be crawled

Thank-you pages, author archives, and slugs left over from an old theme do not help a customer. If they stay in the sitemap, they are still being offered to crawlers. The useful pages are the ones that answer a search: the home page, the service pages, and the order page.

After payment, the generator maps the public site and writes which URLs it found. The report can name a thank-you URL or an old slug and say to noindex it. It does not claim it opened every URL on a large site.

Internal links decide what gets found

A header that only links Home, Menu, and Order leaves cakes and wholesale dependent on a secondary page. Those URLs can exist and still be hard to reach. The structure section says where the links are missing.

• Noindex thank-you and author archive URLs, and remove them from the sitemap.
• Leave old slugs until the important pages are fixed. Changing a slug needs a redirect.
• Link the money pages from the homepage with anchors that match the offer.

Pair this with the written benefits

The value is the named URL, not a health percentage. That is covered on the benefits page. The canonical problem on a page that is linked well is a separate fix, described in wrong canonicals.