Technical SEO FAQ · XML Sitemaps & Robots.txt
What happens if a URL is blocked by robots.txt but included in an XML sitemap?
The sitemap tells Google the URL exists, while robots.txt tells Google it cannot crawl the URL.
This creates conflicting operational signals.
Google can know the URL exists even though it cannot fetch its content.
Do not use the sitemap to force Google to crawl a URL that robots.txt blocks.
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