Feature Request Summary:

Currently public sitemap includes all the articles, even those that are in draft sections (and therefore not visible publicly). It would be great to have these articles not to includes into public sitemap, because following their links will cause 404 errors

Description/Use Cases: 

Google crawler (or other crawler) gets site structure from the automatically generated public sitemap and doesn't meet non-published articles. Then these articles' URLs are never crawled and 404 errors are not generated.

Business impact of limitation or missing feature:

Google says that crawler bot can't find articles that are actually in the public sitemap but cannot be accessed since these articles are in the draft section. Having such articles' URLs publicly accessible can negatively affect ranking. Option to manually exclude every article from the draft section and every newly created (and still non-published) from the Google requires separate person to exclude specified URLs each time when new article is created/moved to draft section/unpublished by website editors.

Other necessary information or resources:

Example of public sitemap: https://support.wildapricot.com/hc/sitemap.xml

Example of an article that is in the draft section and therefore not visible publicly but still in public sitemap: https://support.wildapricot.com/hc/en-us/articles/216528527-Can-I-add-Wild-Apricot-to-my-existing-website-7