Hello,
Thank you for contacting the support, and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
It looks like your sitemaps returned 404 when Google tries to access them. Can you please check your sitemap page and see if it loads correctly? Your sitemap URL should come like this: https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml.
If your sitemap page does return 404, please follow these steps:
1. Flush the Sitemap cache by following this video screencast:
https://i.rankmath.com/pipRDp
2. Exclude the Sitemap files of the Rank Math plugin in your caching plugin. The cache could be via a plugin or from the server. For plugins or Cloudflare, please follow this article:
https://rankmath.com/kb/exclude-sitemaps-from-caching/
Let me know how it goes. We are looking forward to helping you.
Hello,
We are seeing a 404 error when accessing your Sitemaps. Please see the screenshots:
https://i.rankmath.com/anNJAd
https://i.rankmath.com/1cqEAk
If Rank Math doesn’t create a sitemap file or if you are getting a 404 error while trying to access your sitemap index, you may have to flush permalinks. Don’t be scared, it is fairly easy to do.
Simply head over to your WordPress admin area and go to Settings > Permalinks and hit the “Save Changes” button once even if you didn’t make any changes on the page.
This should fix the issue.
Hello!
Thanks, now there is no more 404 error, but in search console nothing has changed. Shall I submit the sitemaps again?
Also I notice that I have to sitemaps for posts. Is that because each site maps contains a max of 200 URL and I have more than 200 posts?
Thanks for your help
cheers
isabella
Hello,
I am glad your issue is resolved.
Yes, you can submit the sitemap again in Google Search Console.
There are 2 post sitemaps because each sitemap contains a max of 200 URLs.
I hope this helps.
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
Thank you so much. it worked. Just one last quick question. I don’t have to resubmit the webstory site map, because it’s already included in the general site map link
sitemap_index.xml
is that correct?
thanks a lot:)
Isabella
Hello,
Yes, only submitting the root sitemap sitemap_index.xml is enough.
I hope this helps.
Looking forward to helping you.
Awesome! thank you very much for your kind help 🙂
stay well
Cheers
isabella
Hello,
We are super happy that your issue is resolved. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.
If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.
If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.
Thank you.
