A tidier sitemap: only the articles worth finding
Our blog now tells search engines which posts are real articles and which are just product-update notes, so the good stuff ranks better.
Our blog carries two very different kinds of posts. Some are genuine articles — guides, case studies, and explainers written for people searching the web, like our pieces on the cost of AI automation or getting started with audio plugin development. Others are short product-update notes: "we shipped this feature", "this site now speaks three languages". Both are useful, but only the first kind is meant to be found through a Google search.
Until now, the list we hand to search engines (the "sitemap") lumped all of them together. That buried our real articles in a crowd of internal update notes and made it harder for the ones we actually want people to discover to rise to the top.
This change adds a simple switch to each post: a quiet flag that says "keep this one out of the sitemap." The update notes stay fully published and reachable — nothing disappears, and every link still works — they're just no longer pushed at search engines as headline content. From now on the sitemap advertises only our genuine articles, which helps search engines spend their attention where it counts.
For anyone writing future posts, the rule of thumb is easy: a real article gets listed automatically; a product-update note gets the flag. The result is a cleaner signal to Google and a better chance for our best writing to be found.