Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing with the ‘noindex’ directive in the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. This can prevent Google from indexing your sitemap, which is crucial for your site’s visibility in search results.
To resolve this issue, please check the following:
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Inspect the HTTP Headers: Use a tool like HTTP Status Checker to verify the headers returned by your sitemap URL. Look specifically for the X-Robots-Tag header and ensure it does not contain a noindex directive.
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Check Your Server Configuration: If you have access to your server configuration files (like .htaccess for Apache or server block for Nginx), ensure that there are no rules set that add a noindex directive to your sitemap.
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Rank Math Settings: In the Rank Math plugin settings, ensure that you have not inadvertently set your sitemap or specific URLs to noindex. You can refer to our guide on how to noindex URLs for more details.
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Caching Issues: Sometimes, caching plugins can serve outdated headers. Clear your site cache and check again.
If after checking these points the issue persists, please reply to this ticket with any additional details or screenshots of your settings, and a human agent from our support team will assist you further.
Thank you for bringing this concern to our attention!
Sources:
Noindex vs. robots.txt: What’s the Difference? » Rank Math
Robots Meta Tag vs X-Robots: Understanding the Difference » Rank Math
No Information is Available for This Page » Rank Math
There is no such problem when disabling the sitemap created by the Rank Math plugin and visual design of the WordPress sitemap. That is, this is not a problem with the server settings or WordPress.
Hello,
Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.
XML Sitemaps are designed to be crawled by search engines, not indexed. The X-Robots-Tag: noindex directive ensures that the sitemap itself does not appear in search results, but this does not prevent Google from crawling its contents and indexing the pages listed within it.
There’s no need to worry, as this is the expected behavior for sitemaps.
Please refrain from submitting your sitemap in Google’s URL Inspection tool. The correct way to submit your sitemap to Google is by following this guide: https://rankmath.com/kb/submit-sitemap-to-google/
However, if you wish to share a sitemap HTML to Google, you can do that with our HTML Sitemap feature: https://rankmath.com/kb/html-sitemap/
Hope that helps.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
