Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
When you say you have “empty categories included in the sitemaps”, do you mean you have enabled the option I show you in the following screencast? https://i.rankmath.com/IExmC2
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
Hello,
Yes, that’s enabled.
I managed to get the index working after adding products to the categories. However, I think overriding an index setting on category level should be possible. But checking “Index” on category level doesn’t work for empty categories (empty means no products assigned).
Hello,
You could try the following workaround:
– You allow to include in the sitemap empty product categories
– You set all the categories as no-index by default
– You set all the categories you want to index as index in the Edit Category page
I have created a screencast showing you how I did it: https://i.rankmath.com/XbQoyd
Looking forward to help you.
Hi,
That’s funny because this is exactly what I’m doing but what’s not working:
“You set all the categories you want to index as index in the Edit Category page”
All categories are set to “Index” on the category edit page – but they show up as “No-Index” when they have no products assigned to.
If you want to enable the system to override anything with the settings on the category edit page then this is a bug.
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
We might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.
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.
Hi, Thank you for your offer but that’s not an option for me.
As I said, I managed to get the categories to show “Index” by adding products to them. If you have a test system you can simply check this for yourself (category page edit “Index” does not override empty category “No-Index”).
I have nothing from spending more time on this just to find out that there is a bug or whatever. I also canÄt wait for an update and I’m happy to have found a way to go.
Thank you!
Hello,
It is fine, we will notify devs about it and try to find the reason of your issue; meanwhile, I am happy to hear you can work with your workaround.
Looking forward to help you.
Hello,
I have the same problem so i have fix it myself without add product in empty category.
It’s a big problem to have to be solved by rankmath.
When category is empty and you set “index” to category, the robot stay to “noindex”.
To force all category to be in INDEX mode you have to add this to your function.php
add_action( ‘wp_head’, function(){
if ( is_product_category() ) {
add_filter( ‘rank_math/frontend/robots’, function( $robots ) {
$robots[‘index’] = ‘index’;
return $robots;
});
}
}, 1 );
Paul
Hello,
Glad to hear that you were able to fix the problem here. You seem to have used the robot’s function to do this. Will make a point of testing this on our end as well.
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.
