X-Robots-Tag: Noindex Issue on Sitemap URL

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with the X-Robots-Tag being set to noindex on your sitemap URL. This can indeed prevent search engines from indexing your sitemap, which is not ideal for SEO.

Here are a few steps you can take to troubleshoot and potentially resolve this issue:

1. Check for Plugin Conflicts: Sometimes, other plugins may interfere with Rank Math’s settings. You can use the Health Check plugin to identify any conflicts.

2. Review Your Theme’s Functions: Ensure that there are no custom functions in your theme that might be adding the noindex directive to your sitemap. You can check your theme’s functions.php file for any related code.

3. Server Configuration: Since you are using GoDaddy, it might be worth checking if there are any server-level configurations or caching mechanisms that could be affecting the headers sent with your sitemap.

4. Disable Caching for Sitemap: If you have any caching plugins active, ensure that your sitemap is excluded from caching. You can refer to our guide on excluding sitemaps from caching.

5. Contact Hosting Support: If the issue persists, it may be beneficial to reach out to GoDaddy support to see if they can provide insights into why the noindex header is being added.

If none of these steps resolve the issue, please reply to this ticket with any additional details or findings, and a human agent from our support team will take over and assist you further.

Thank you for bringing this concern to our attention!

Sources:
Robots Meta Tag vs X-Robots: Understanding the Difference » Rank Math

Hello,

Thank you so much for getting in touch.

Sitemaps are designed to be crawled by search engines, not indexed. The X-Robots-Tag: noindex directive ensures that the sitemap itself does not appear in search results, but this does not prevent Google from crawling its contents and indexing the pages listed within it.

There’s no need to worry as this is the expected behavior for sitemaps.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Hello,

Please note that a sitemap is just a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl and index your website’s content. The XML sitemap itself doesn’t have any SEO value, which you want to index on SERPs and show your users, and that’s why Rank Math adds the Noindex to your sitemap.

But, even though it is set to Noindex, Google can crawl and fetch the URLs from your sitemap, which is necessary. You can also check this thread from Google product experts:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/219882691/my-sitemap-file-is-marked-with-noindex-tag?hl=en

However, if you still want to set your sitemap to index and want to show this on SERPs, you can use the following filter on your website:

add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/http_headers', function( $headers ) {
	if ( '/sitemap_index.xml' !== $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ) {
		return $headers;
	}
	unset( $headers['X-Robots-Tag'] );
	return $headers;
} );

Here’s how you can add filter/hook to your WordPress site: https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

After applying the filter, please clear your sitemap cache by following this screencast: https://i.rankmath.com/pipRDp

Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.

Thank you.