Sitemap couldn’t fetch..

Hello,

I’m sorry to hear that you are facing issues with submitting your sitemap to Google. If you have followed the steps mentioned in the Rank Math articles and are still encountering problems, there are a few additional troubleshooting steps you can take to resolve the issue:

1. Rename the Sitemap File: You can try changing the name of the sitemap file as suggested by John Mueller. In Google Search Console, go to Indexing → Sitemaps and add a new sitemap with the URL https://yourdomain.com/?sitemap=1.

2. Fix Sitemap Issues: Ensure that your sitemap is correctly configured by validating it using the Validate XML Sitemap tool. Make sure the sitemap is located in the root folder of your WordPress installation and that your posts are set to index.

3. Add the Correct Site URL to Google Search Console: Verify that you have added the correct URL variation to Google Search Console. You can check the correct variation of your site in Settings → General in your WordPress dashboard.

If after trying these steps you are still facing issues, please feel free to reach out to our support team directly for further assistance. We are here to help!

Thank you for reaching out!

Sources:
Troubleshooting the “Couldn’t Fetch” Error in Google Search Console » Rank Math
How to Submit a Sitemap to Google » Rank Math

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

Could you please share your sitemap URL with us so that we can check the issue further for you?

Meanwhile, please try to follow the steps below and see if that works for you:

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/

Once done, clear your website cache, remove all the submitted sitemap, and resubmit only the /sitemap_index.xml in the Search Console.

Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.

Hello,

After further investigation, it seems that you have set a crawl delay in your robots.txt (see screenshot below) which may disrupt how Google will crawl your website.

Please use this robots.txt directive instead:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Sitemap: https://noworry.cc/sitemap_index.xml

Here’s how you edit your robots.txt in the Rank Math plugin: https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-edit-robots-txt-with-rank-math/

After that, try re-submitting the sitemap again.

Looking forward to helping you.

Hello,

We visited the sitemap while simulating as a Googlebot and the sitemap gave the 200 status, which shows that everything is fine.

Please give Google some time to crawl and read your sitemap then check again.

If everything is fine on your end, and Google may still return the error, please note that not all sitemaps are processed by Google. Not necessarily because there is something wrong with the sitemap.

Even a perfect sitemap may not be processed by Google.

Most of the time, it’s still sitting in the queue waiting for processing. Remember, Google is processing millions of sitemap daily, sometimes it takes time to get to yours. But for whatever reason, Google never gets around to some sitemaps. It just doesn’t think it is worth it.

And Search Console sometimes shows ‘Pending’ as ‘couldn’t fetch’ incorrectly. You can check the replies of Google experts for the Couldn’t Fetch(especially for the TLDs except for .com) issues on the following threads:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/29055233/missing-xml-sitemap-data-in-google-search-console-for-tld-domain?hl=en
https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/31835653/sitemap-couldn-t-fetch-sitemap-couldn-t-be-read-by-google-search-console?hl=en

You can try using a different sitemap plugin like https://wordpress.org/plugins/xml-sitemap-generator-for-google/ to generate the sitemap and see if Google can read them. Please make sure to disable the Sitemap module of our plugin in WP Dashboard > Rank Math > Dashboard.

Let us know how that goes. Looking forward to helping you.

Hello,

Don’t worry, currently it seems that it shows that error until Google has had time to process the sitemap. Give it a day or two and things should look fine.

Until your sitemap is processed it can display Couldn't fetch or the longer Sitemap could not be read message, in reality, it just means it hasn’t fetched it yet.

There may be nothing wrong with the sitemap, Google just hasn’t processed it yet. When fetching/processing occurs, and there IS an issue, you will typically get a more specific message.

In the meantime, you can follow this guide on Google to debug the issue: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451001?hl=en#fetch_errors&zippy=%2Csitemap-fetch-errors

We hope that helps.

Thank you.