Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing with your blog posts not appearing in your sitemap despite being indexed and ranking. This can happen due to a few reasons:
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Custom Canonicals: If you have set custom canonical URLs for your posts, they may not appear in the sitemap. Rank Math includes a self-referencing canonical by default, so removing any custom canonicals might help.
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Sitemap Settings: Double-check your sitemap settings in Rank Math to ensure that the posts are set to be included in the sitemap. You can do this by navigating to Rank Math SEO → Sitemap Settings and ensuring that the post types you want included are checked.
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Plugin Conflicts: Sometimes, other plugins can conflict with Rank Math. You can check for conflicts using the Health Check plugin.
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Visibility Settings: Ensure that the posts are not set to "noindex" or have visibility settings that prevent them from being included in the sitemap.
If you’ve checked all these and the issue persists, we recommend replying to your ticket with your site URL so that a human agent from our support team can assist you further. Thank you for raising this concern!
Sources:
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
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/
For more details on this issue, you can check this URL: https://rankmath.com/kb/url-not-in-sitemap/
Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.
perfect first step worked, thanks so much! Do i need to change the “Links Per Sitemap” back to 200 now?
Hello,
Yes, but if your sitemap is fixed just by changing the “Links Per Sitemap” option, that indicates that your sitemap is heavily cached so the issue may just re-occur in the future.
We recommend following the rest of the steps we shared previously. That should permanently fix the sitemap caching issue.
Hope that helps.
okay good to know, but the thing is. i have always had /(.*)sitemap(.*).xml/
/(.*)sitemap.xsl/ in WPRocket settings, well before i started having issues with these recent blog posts not showing.
Hello,
If the issue was fixed upon flushing the permalinks, then your sitemap must still be cached.
The cache could be via a plugin or from the server, so we recommend checking your server-caching as well and excluding your sitemap files.
Looking forward to helping you.
But I have always had the following /(.*)sitemap(.*).xml/
/(.*)sitemap.xsl/ in my WPRocket settings. So what else could I be doing to prevent this in the future?
I do use cloudfare for my CDN, should I follow the exclude sitemap caching instructions for cloud fare?
Hello,
Yes, you should exclude your sitemap paths from your Cloudflare caching as well if you have that enabled.
Please note that there a multiple factors that caused the sitemap to be heavily cached and one of which is from the caching plugins. Since the caching rules are already applied to WP Rocket you may proceed to the next step, which is disabling the transient caching by applying 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/
Hope that helps.
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.
