Sitemap XML title in search results

Question

I have a website that uses an XML sitemap and a robots.txt file.

If I do a Google search of:

site: mywebsite.co.uk "sitemap"

I see the usual Google response, similar to the following image, but the title has been automatically generated by the search engine. Unfortunately, the title isn't applicable for the website.

I don't think there is a way of influencing this title since this is an XML file rather than a HTML file?

If I add Disallow: /sitemap/ to Robots.txt will this only have the effect of hiding the sitemap in the search results, or will it have the side effect of stopping it from working at all?

Answer 1

You shouldn't exclude the file from crawling with robots.txt - in this case Google will not be able to read it. What you should do, is to de-index it. If you run Apache, add to your htaccess following rule:

<FilesMatch "robots.txt|sitemap.xml">
    Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>

This rule add noindex to your sitemap and robots files, so they don' appear in SERP.

Answer 2

Are you saying you want a title for your sitemap?

Is this because you found it in Google?

Sitemaps are files that contain structured data that help search engines find your pages. Nothing more. They are not intended to be content, found by users, searched for, etc. In short, they are not designed to have a title.

You are worrying about something that is not even an issue. The solution for your question is to forget about it and move on to something more productive to your success.