Hide the Index File from Primary Navigation

Purpose:

This article provides step-by-step instructions on how to remove /index.html from your sitemap.xml, ensuring a cleaner crawl for Googlebot and other site indexing tools.

Tools Required: Firefox

Hide index.html

1. In TNT WebApps, open the CMS for the domain you wish to update.
2. Go to the Page Editor.
3. Select Change Page > Edit Nav.
4. Change the status of the “Home” page from “Hide” to “Show”. This action will hide the Home page from the primary navigation.

By hiding the Home page from the navigation, /index.html will no longer appear in the sitemap.xml nor will “Home” remain visible as part of the primary navigation on the website.

Create a New Sitemap (sitemap-home.xml)

1. In the CMS, go to Tools > File Browser and scroll to the bottom of the page.
2. Under Create / Upload, select Create File.
3. Change the file name from new_file to sitemap-home and ensure the file extension is .xml (e.g., sitemap-home.xml).
4. Copy the following XML code and paste it (without formatting) into the file area:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
        http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
    <url>
        <loc>https://www.example.com</loc>
        <priority>1.00</priority>
    </url>
</urlset>

• Replace example.com with the actual domain name you are working on.
• Select Override and ensure “System will automatically select folder” is changed to /.
• Click Add File in the lower right corner.
• After the upload, verify the upload by scrolling to the top of the site, ensuring the message “1 item uploaded” appears with the file path /sitemap-home.xml.

Update the robots.txt File

1. In the File Browser, locate robots.txt and click the edit link next to it.
2. Add the following lines to robots.txt, replacing example.com with the actual domain:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap-home.xml
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/blog/post-sitemap.xml

• Click Save File to commit the changes.

Publish the Site

1. To finalize, click Publish Site and then Publish Pages.
2. Once the pages are published, log into the Blog and update the theme files to reflect the changes.  
3. The updated files will now be live on the server.

Verify the Changes

Run Screaming Frog to ensure that the /index.html file no longer appears in the sitemap.xml and that Googlebot can properly crawl the site.