Hugo sitemap.xml with exclude/hide functionality. Save as `/layouts/_default/sitemap.xml`. Set `hidden` to `true` in your posts frontmatter to exclude a page from the sitemap.

sitemap.xml

{{ printf "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" standalone=\"yes\"?>" | safeHTML }}
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  {{ range .Data.Pages }}
    {{- if and (.Permalink) (not .Params.hidden) -}}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ .Permalink }}</loc>{{ if not .Lastmod.IsZero }}
    <lastmod>{{ safeHTML ( .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05-07:00" ) }}</lastmod>{{ end }}{{ with .Sitemap.ChangeFreq }}
    <changefreq>{{ . }}</changefreq>{{ end }}{{ if ge .Sitemap.Priority 0.0 }}
    <priority>{{ .Sitemap.Priority }}</priority>{{ end }}{{ if .IsTranslated }}{{ range .Translations }}
    <xhtml:link
                rel="alternate"
                hreflang="{{ .Language.Lang }}"
                href="{{ .Permalink }}"
                />{{ end }}
    <xhtml:link
                rel="alternate"
                hreflang="{{ .Language.Lang }}"
                href="{{ .Permalink }}"
                />{{ end }}
  </url>
    {{- end -}}
  {{ end }}
</urlset>

This is a Hugo sitemap.xml template with the ability to hide certain pages to prevent search engines from finding them.

Usage

1. Save this as /layouts/_default/sitemap.xml.
2. Set hidden to true in the front matter of a page to exclude it from the sitemap.

Notes

Beware that this only excludes the page from the sitemap. You also need to add <meta name=robots content="noindex, nofollow"> to your html if hidden is true to prevent search engines from including the page.

The original sitemap.xml template can be found here.

It looks like the original sitemap.xml is already able to disable a page by specifying Sitemap.Disable = true?

Looks like it only happened last week: gohugoio/hugo@6738a3e

@xuhdev thanks for the update! Good to know that it's finally supported out of the box