Yoast and SiteMap Index XML

Leaving SEO (Search Engine Optimization) up to one piece of software is not wise. Especially if it is Yoast. Now don't get me wrong, Yoast does a fairly good job at most things. My biggest complaint with it is how much it abstracts what is really going on and substitutes its own terminology.

Here's an example Yoast making it absolutely unclear what it is doing, or looked at from another perspective, making it do something: Objective; Turn off or disable the Site Map for all Posts. Here's how: First click on the SEO Tab (not a Tab named Yoast, that would be too obvious), then select Search Appearance, then select the Content Types Tab, then under Posts, Settings for single Post URLs select No. Hmmm, there doesn't seem to be any literary connection between the objective and how to achieve it. This is an example of "Appling" something up. That means they've dumbed it down to the level of someone that probably shouldn't be doing something like this in the first place. But that's OK, just let a magic piece of software take care of everything you don't know about. That's a solution for success, right?

But what about the helpful information they provide? If one selects the Question Mark next to this item it states, "Not showing Posts in the search results technically means those will have a noindex robots meta and will be excluded from XML sitemaps." It also provides a link for additional information. The help from the Question Mark might lead one to believe that Yoast will make an entry in the robots.txt (look it up) file. Nope, only a backhanded suggestion. And the "additional information" link? It never explicitly states what it does. It babbles about this and that, but never states what it really does by changing the setting to "No". This sentence from the help page should be expanded, "We’ve taken away a lot of the confusion around indexing content and XML sitemaps by simplifying things.", and have this added, "...plus we've simplified the explanation and also taken away any other useful information, which should only confuse intelligent people." Now to be fair if one continues to dig into their "expert" section, they finally get around to giving a better explanation (https://yoast.com/what-is-an-xml-sitemap-and-why-should-you-have-one/).

So my suggestion would be to have a great big On / Off Button on the dashboard of their interface that says: "Advanced Interface: On / Off" which changes everything to smarten it up from its dumbed down display.