Googlebot is crawling unpublished pages from Adobe AEM and getting 404 errors

Question

My company is currently using Adobe AEM as a CMS for our company website. We are currently having issues with 4xx errors appearing specifically 404 as unpublished pages are still being crawled. What is the best method for SEO to improve this?

1. Hide in sitemap
2. Write robots.txt rule for each page affected to be ignored?
3. Create a redirect to homepage or relevant page?

Answer 1

If the unpublished pages are in your sitemap, then removing them from your sitemap is the ideal solution.

Write robots.txt rule for each page affected to be ignored?

This is likely to work. But having blocked URLs in your sitemap might Google to trust your sitemap less.

Create a redirect to homepage or relevant page?

Please don't! Once that pages are published, it might be a while until Google crawls them again since the Google bot saw a redirect the last time.