Customize the author sitemap

Yoast SEO plugin can create a sitemap that lists the author archive pages for sites with multiple authors. The author sitemap lists the authors.

Screenshot showing list of authors in author sitemap. — Author sitemap inside Yoast SEO sitemap

Customize sitemap
Exclude individual author’s feature
Exclude authors filter

Customize sitemap

After enabling author archives, you will have some additional options to customize the author sitemap. You can change the archive settings when you go to Yoast SEO > Settings > Advanced > Author archives:

Screenshot shows the Yoast SEO Author archives under Yoast SEO settings — Author archives in Yoast SEO

There you’ll have some more options as you can see in this screenshot:

Search appearance of author archives in Yoast SEO

Show author archives in search results
- Yes. The author sitemap will be created.
- No. The author sitemap will not be created.
Show archives for authors without posts in search results.
- Yes. All authors will be included in the sitemap.
- No. Only authors with published content will be included in the sitemap.
- Need to exclude individual authors?
Title & meta description templates
- These will be used to generate the title and meta description of the author archive page.

Exclude individual author’s feature

Excluding an individual author does not remove the author’s contents from other sitemaps.

After enabling author archives, you can prevent individual users from appearing in the author sitemap.

Log in to your WordPress website
When you’re logged in, you will be in your Dashboard.
Click on Users
On the left-hand side, you will see a menu. In that menu, click on Users.
Click Edit for the username of the user you want to exclude
Under Yoast SEO Settings, check the Do not allow search engines to show this author’s archives in search results. box
Click Update User

If you have a single author, please disable the author archives.

Exclude authors filter

Yoast comes with the following filter:

wpseo_sitemap_exclude_author

This filter can be further used to customize the sitemap to exclude authors. It can be used to bulk exclude authors or exclude authors based on certain conditions. This will likely require some development work. You can learn more about the filters from developer portal.