Our scenario is we've got multiple pages set up for category-based browsing, such as example.com/products/boardgames
A list of the canonical URLs for the categories is in the sitemap, with a frequency of weekly.
From time to time, it's likely that these URLs will produce 0 items in the category, potentially for weeks/months at a time. In this case, I'd like those results to be removed from crawlers until there's some results.
I had thought to leave them in the sitemap, but dynamically add a meta
-robots
noindex
tag to the head
. Would this have the desired effect of removing the webpage from search results when there's no items, and then re-added when there are results available?