Need to fix issue with GSC sitemap "theme default template"

[NailaS9]

Hi everyone,

My name is Naila, and I run a blog called Simply Zen Living. I'm quite new to SEO and technical website stuff, so I’m hoping someone here can guide me.

I was checking my sitemap in Google Search Console and noticed something odd — it’s showing “theme default template” in the sitemap instead of actual content pages.

I’m using the Newspaper theme on my WordPress site, and it seems like the sitemap is pulling in the theme’s default template rather than actual URLs or posts.

Here’s a screenshot attached for reference.

Has anyone faced something similar or know how I can fix this issue? Any help would be truly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Naila.

[Wesimplifi_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @NailaS9,

Try accessing your robots.txt file it's a small file that tells Google which parts of your site to ignore. You can add a simple line like Disallow: /tdb_templates/ to block those template URLs from being crawled. If your hosting provider (like Bluehost, SiteGround, etc.) or your theme’s settings panel allows you to edit robots.txt, that’s a clean way to fix this.

Another approach is to manually remove the template sitemap from Google Search Console. Just go to the “Sitemaps” section in GSC and remove /tdb_templates-sitemap.xml if it’s been submitted this won’t delete anything on your site but will stop Google from trying to crawl it.

[NailaS9]

Awesome. Thank you for sharing these fixes, and the second one seems doable. I can do that. Thanks again.