Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing with your author page not showing in the sitemap. It sounds like you’ve taken several important steps to troubleshoot this issue, which is great. Here are a few additional suggestions that might help:
-
Check Sitemap Settings: Ensure that your author pages are included in the sitemap settings within Rank Math. You can do this by navigating to Rank Math > Sitemap Settings and confirming that the author archives are enabled.
-
Re-generate the Sitemap: After making changes, it’s a good idea to regenerate your sitemap. You can do this by going to Rank Math > Sitemap Settings and clicking on the Save Changes button, which will refresh your sitemap.
-
Verify Author Page Accessibility: Make sure that your author page is accessible to both users and search engines. You can check this by visiting the author page directly and ensuring it loads correctly without any errors.
-
Use Google Search Console: Check Google Search Console for any crawl errors or issues related to your author page. This tool can provide insights into how Google is indexing your site and if there are any problems.
-
Wait for Re-indexing: Sometimes, it may take a while for Google to re-index your pages after changes have been made. Be patient and monitor the situation over the next few days.
If you have checked all these aspects and the issue persists, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will assist you further. Thank you for raising this concern!
I did all those things. I did get get the following from search console. There is no redirect for my author page so not sure what that is but I took all the steps you listed and even ran my WP Rocket cache and still nothing. I look inside the sitemap itself and it is not even there.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eAXerT5Z13fo_ou3zOjPlMl4HqUgLEWo/view?usp=sharing
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.
Please ensure that your Author archives are enabled in Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Author.
Also, check the robots meta should be set to index
Once done, 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/
Looking forward to helping you.
I did all these things and it is still not showing up.
I am traveling for work so it may take some time for me to respond to replies.
WP Rocket already has the sitemaps excluded. I added the snippet and no change.
Hello,
In this case, 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.
Ok I added it. I will be in conferences all day so it may take me awhile to reply to anything so I apologize
Hello,
Your author sitemap is working on the /author-sitemap.xml URL but not showing on the main /sitemap_index.xml because of the Exclude some user roles in the sitemap settings.
However, we already shared this with our developers and they are investigating it. As soon as we get some updates, we’ll make sure to let you know here.
For now, you can deselect the Exclude User Roles in Rank Math > Sitemap Settings > Authors to make it work properly.
We also noticed you’re using a very backdated version of the Rank Math PRO plugin on your website but the account you have used to open this ticket is the Rank Math free version.
Please search and forward a receipt from FastSpring.com so we can locate your account and verify it.
Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
Ok I will check this out on my lunch break and reply then. Thank you!
Hello,
It looks like the users capabilities (Roles) entries are not available in the user meta table;
When you run below query, no results are found, but there should be for each user who has one or more roles (RankMath uses this in the subquery for the author sitemap ).
global $wpdb;
$users_roles = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->usermeta} WHERE meta_key = 'wp_capabilities'");
Could you please try a viable solution; installing https://wordpress.org/plugins/reset-roles-and-capabilities/, to reset the capabilities, and letting us know how things turn out.
Please make a complete backup of your database before resetting the capabilities.
Thank you.
So I added the plug in and I had iMark Interactive back up my site for me (Grayson Bell does my site management for me) and the plug in messed up the site so he had me remove it (he went in and had the same issues with the settings on the site being removed so it was both of us that had the issue).
So the plug in is not fixing the issue because when I installed it, it took away my ability to even generate a sitemap.
Hello,
Please try to use this plugin to create Users/Roles capabilities: https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-access-manager/
Please completely back up your site before making modifications.
Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
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.
