Do not index empty detail pages on Google

November 25, 2025

If a detail page is used as an “empty” page only for displaying detail contents but does not itself contain any content to display, it can be excluded from indexing by search engines.

Until now, detail pages have always been listed in the automatically generated “sitemap.xml” file for search engines, even if they do not contain any content themselves. This means that the pages are found by search engines such as Google and displayed as empty pages.

OpenCms can now be configured to prevent such detail pages from being listed in the “sitemap.xml” file.

Additional markup of “empty” detail pages and activation of the exception

With the Mercury template, a meta tag is also set in the source code of the detail pages to instruct search engines not to index these pages:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

Please note: To activate this feature for your site, please contact your OpenCms administration.