Hello,
I apologize for the issues you are facing with your sitemap and Google recognition of your Contact page. To address the problems you mentioned:
-
Sitemap Error:
-
Contact Page Redirect Error:
- Google is reporting a redirect error for your Contact page. Even if you haven’t set up any redirects, there might be an underlying issue causing this. To investigate further:
- Check if there are any unintended rules in your robots.txt file or conflicts causing this issue.
- Ensure that the Contact page is not inadvertently excluded from indexing.
If after following these steps the issues persist, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will assist you further.
Thank you for reaching out, and we appreciate your patience as we work to resolve these issues for you.
Kind regards.
Sources:
Troubleshooting the “Couldn’t Fetch” Error in Google Search Console » Rank Math
Why the Sitemap_Index.xml is Throwing a 404 Error » Rank Math
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
The validator tool returns:- Incorrect http header content-type: “text/html; charset=UTF-8” (expected: “application/xml”)
The contact page is not set to noindex – https://prnt.sc/3Y53v6-Ipcn2
The robots file shows <meta name=’robots’ content=’max-image-preview:large’ /> but no “follow, index” as I would have expected.
Thank you for your help.
Hello,
Your pages are already set to index.
To fix the sitemap, please follow these steps to flush your sitemap cache:
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/
3. Disable the transient cache for the sitemap by applying this filter. This will make sure that your XML sitemap always reflects the latest changes on your site:
/**
* Filter if XML sitemap transient cache is enabled.
*
* @param boolean $unsigned Enable cache or not, defaults to true
*/
add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');
If you’re not sure how to add this code, you can follow this guide:
https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/
Regarding the redirect error, please share the screenshot of the issue so we can check.
Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you. Google now reports “success” in fetching the sitemap.
Regarding the redirect issue I’m not sure what screenshot you are after. The contact page is not listed but perhaps it will be now that Google has the sitemap? This is what I see at the moment https://prnt.sc/MntNUCodbi-B as far as Google is concerned but they are due to crawl again. However I still don’t understand why there is any form of redirect where this page is concerned. Are you able to explain that? Could I have caused that in some way?
Just one point of information that I should have mentioned earlier is that the site is built using the Divi Theme in case that has any bearing on it.
Thank you for your continued interest in this problem.
Hello,
We checked your contact page and we can see it is getting redirected from the non-trailing slash to the trailing slash.
Please note that if the page is not causing any problems and redirects users to the correct page, then there is no need to fix it and you can ignore the error.
For more details on this issue, you can check this URL: https://rankmath.com/kb/page-with-redirect/
Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.
Thank you.
Thank you for your reply which is much appreciated.
I notice though that the services page also goes to a training slash but the redirect problem does not occur which confuses my understanding. Also why are there training slashes? Is it something I have done? The pages of all my sites that use RankMath have a training slash but not a redirect error. In this case should I set up a redirect from non trailing to trailing – would that resolve the problem because although you say it’s not necessary the fact is that Google is not indexing that page with or without the trailing slash.
Hello,
If your site’s permalink structure has a trailing slash, it is proper for the URLs without trailing slash to be redirected to the variant with a trailing slash. This is to avoid duplicate content issues which can harm your SEO as Google will not index a URL with a redirect.
Google Search Console (GSC) is only reporting that URL because it found it somewhere on your site and tried to crawl it. You should use the GSC URL inspection tool to run the URL and find out its referring page. Thereafter you should remove or correct it on the referring page. It is likely that the URL without trailing slash was added to one of your site’s pages.
Hope that helps, and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
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.
