why does my site map for categories show up as page cant be found?

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.

For initial troubleshooting, please make sure that your sitemap is not getting cached. Please follow these steps:

1. Ensure you’re using the latest version of your plugins/theme including the Rank Math plugin.

2. Flush the Sitemap cache by following this video screencast:
https://i.rankmath.com/xXXhDt

3. Exclude the Sitemap files of the Rank Math plugin in your caching plugin. The cache could be via a plugin or from the server:
https://rankmath.com/kb/exclude-sitemaps-from-caching/

If the issue still persists, please check this link for the common reasons why the sitemap doesn’t show a URL:
https://rankmath.com/kb/url-not-in-sitemap/

I hope that helps.

Thank you.

Hello,

Can you please make sure that the categories are set as index in WP Dashboard > Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Categories?

If the issue persists even if they are set as index then we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.

Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.

It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/

You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/

We really look forward to helping you.

Hello,

If you want your category sitemap to work and your categories to be indexed in the search results then you will have to set them as index. If you don’t want them to be displayed in the search results then you can leave them as noindex but then your category sitemap will also not work.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you need any other assistance.

Thanks.