Magento2 – How to Remove Sitemap Link in Footer

To create a footer link add the following to your theme's layout/local.xml file (if it doesn't exist, create it):

<default>
    <reference name="footer_links">
        <action method="addLink" translate="label title" module="catalog" ifconfig="catalog/seo/site_map">
            <label>Site Map</label>
            <url helper="catalog/map/getCategoryUrl" />
            <title>Site Map</title>
        </action>
    </reference>
</default>

Create a file app/design/frontend/rwd/default/layout/local.xml

and add the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<layout>
<default>
        <reference name="footer">
                <remove name="footer.newsletter" />
        </reference>
</default>
</layout>

It may be that you were doing it in a XML file before the newsletter template had actually been loaded, or if you were doing it in a local.xml file you had the wrapper tags missing, but I've just verified on a clean install of 1.9 and it's working as it should.