Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing with the 404 errors for your glossary and category sitemaps. To resolve this, you may need to flush your permalinks. Here’s how you can do that:
- Go to your WordPress admin area.
- Navigate to Settings → Permalinks.
- Click the Save Changes button, even if you didn’t make any changes on the page.
This action often resolves 404 errors related to sitemaps.
If the issue persists, please ensure that your glossary and category settings are correctly configured in Rank Math. You can check this by going to Rank Math SEO → Sitemap Settings and ensuring that these types of sitemaps are enabled.
If you continue to experience problems, please reply to this ticket with any additional details or errors you might be encountering, and a human agent from our support team will assist you further.
Thank you for raising this concern!
Sources:
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
Hello,
Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.
Please make sure that there are actual posts associated with that particular category or any taxonomy you have and that they are set to index and make sure that the option “Include Empty Terms” is turned on as well. You can set that in Rank Math → Sitemap Settings → Category.
After that, please follow the steps below:
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. Apply the following filter code to your site.
add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');
Here’s how you can add filter to your WordPress site:https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/
Let us know how that goes. Looking forward to helping you.
I have implemented the instructions step by step. The glossary-sitemap is now displayed, but unfortunately the category-sitemap is still not. What else can I do?
Hello,
Please head over to your WP Dashboard > Rank Math > Titles & Meta and from there make sure the taxonomies are set to index.
If the issue persists, then we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress & FTP 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/
Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
Hello,
I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?
Thank you.
To make matters worse, Google has also thrown almost all of my pages out of the search. This morning I saw in the Search Console that only three of my pages are still indexed! I’m a bit desperate.
Hello,
Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.
The issue here is that your categories are set to noindex as you can see from this screenshot:
Enabling it to index now fixes the issue:
As for your indexing issue, please check for URLs in your Google Search Console and look for any coverage issues that may tell us why your website is not being indexed on the SERP. You may refer to this guide: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203?hl=en
Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you so much! I was confused about the word “archives”. That’s why I set it to noindex and thought it couldn’t have an effect on categories.
Now I still have to check why Google isn’t indexing my pages and posts.
Hello,
You can reach out to us with your findings on Google Search Console.
Meanwhile, we are super happy that this resolved your issue. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.
If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.
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.
