Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math today, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
This typically indicates that your sitemap is cached on your end. To fix this, delete your site cache and exclude your sitemap URLs from being cached, then perform the following:
1. Go to Settings > Permalinks in the WordPress Dashboard.
Once, press the save button.
2. Go to Rank Math > Sitemap Settings in the WordPress Dashboard.
Once, press the save button.
That should take care of the problem.
Before uploading your sitemap to GSC, you can validate it here to see if it has any issues: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html
I hope this information is helpful, and please do not hesitate to contact us if you require any additional support.
Thank you.
Hello,
Yes im using nginx fastcgi caching, but even if I purge the cache the page remain blank..
about putting exception in caching unfortunately there is no way to whitelist URL in case of fastcgi caching, so can you please suggest something different?
Hello,
UPDATE*
I have whitelisted the URL slugs for sitemap in fastcgi caching, i dig little and found out that i can be able to whitelist them, but unfortunately it also didn’t worked.. my sitemap page is still blank. Please help me!
Hello,
Could you please include your FTP login as well so we can further investigate the issue?
Looking forward to helping you with this one.
FTP –
[moved to sensitive data section]
Hello,
If you visit the /sitemap-index.xml URI on your site (or any of the sitemaps under it, such as /post-sitemap1.xml), and view the source code, you can see that the XML sitemap itself is working, but the linked XSL file is not – /main-sitemap.xsl returns a 404.
We can only access that with the direct URI that looks like this: /?xsl=main.
So the issues are basically that /sitemap.xml should redirect to /sitemap-index.xml and /?xsl=main should be rewritten to /main-sitemap.xsl (the rewrite pattern looks like this: '/([a-z]+)?-?sitemap\.xsl$/' => '?xsl=$1').
These issues are most probably related to your server configuration. Please get in touch with your hosting provider about these.
I’d like to add that the only purpose of the XSL file is to make the sitemap “human-readable” so in terms of SEO it doesn’t make a difference. Google will still see the sitemap correctly, even without the XSL. And, if you send in the correct /sitemap-index.xml to Google in Search Console, then the /sitemap.xml redirection isn’t important either.
In other words, these issues will not hurt your SEO.
Hope that helps clarify your doubts and solve the issues.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.
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.
