The request
“Exclude specific products from the sitemap and from Google, but keep them working in our internal site search. Customers who know what they want should still find them.”
Discretion for search engines, discoverability for customers.
The approach
We tagged the products to exclude and set them to no-index and out of the sitemap, while leaving the store's internal search untouched so they remain findable on-site.
What we shipped
Tagged products excluded from the sitemap
No-index applied to tagged products
Internal search unaffected
Verified in Search Console