Hello,
I’m sorry to hear that you’re experiencing issues with your sitemap. It seems that the empty archives are still showing up despite being excluded in the settings.
Based on the information you’ve provided, it seems like you’ve already taken some troubleshooting steps such as resetting the settings, permalinks, and clearing the cache.
To further investigate this issue, I recommend checking the specific settings for the brand pages in your Rank Math SEO plugin. You may want to ensure that the “Include Empty Terms” option is disabled for the brand archives.
If the issue persists, please consider reaching out to our dedicated support team by clicking on the “Contact our dedicated support team” link on our support page. Our team is available 24/7 and will be more than happy to assist you further.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we appreciate your patience as we work to resolve this issue for you.
Best regards.
Sources:
How to Configure Sitemaps in Rank Math – Best Settings and Tips
Why Isn’t My URL Included in the Sitemap? » Rank Math
How to Fix the Submitted URL Seems to Be a “Soft 404” Error » Rank Math
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
Can you 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/
3. If the above steps don’t seem to work, kindly apply the following filter to your site.
add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');
Here’s how you can add filter/hook to your WordPress site:
https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/
Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
Thank you for the reply!
I did all the steps, but unfortunately still empty archives in the brand sitemap, for example https://www.catsfavorites.com/brand/bogadent/
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,
Sorry for the delay.
Checking the URL https://www.catsfavorites.com/brand/avalon/, it seems this page has already been removed from the sitemap.
However, the “/bogadent” page is still showing. This is because that term has 2 posts assigned to it as you can see from this screenshot:
Can you please confirm how you have added those 2 posts/pages? It currently doesn’t appear in the post list or product list.
Looking forward to helping you.
It seems you are right:
1. Emtpy brand archives do not show up anymore in the brand sitemap -> very nice
2. There are 2 products assigned to the brand /bogadent:
About number 2: those products are out of stock so they do not show in any WooCommerce archive.
So I guess the question is: how can I exclude empty brand archives from the brand sitemap -> when the archive is empty for the user (so show only archives with on stock products).
Hello,
This option helps to set empty product archive pages to no-index for WooCommerce Catalog is PRO feature. https://rankmath.com/kb/general-settings/#noindex-hidden-products
We suggest editing the empty archives and set them to ‘noindex’ to remove them from the sitemap.
Hope this helps, and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Thank you for choosing Rank Math.
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.
