Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing with your website’s sitemap and the spam posts affecting your Google Search Console. Here are some steps you can take to resolve the issue:
1. Clean Up Your Website
Before generating a new sitemap, it’s crucial to remove any spam posts or unwanted content from your WordPress site. You can do this by:
- Deleting Spam Posts: Go to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Posts, and delete any posts that are not yours.
- Check for Malware: Use a security plugin to scan your site for malware or vulnerabilities that may have allowed spam content to be added.
2. Regenerate Your Sitemap
Once you have cleaned up your site, you can regenerate your sitemap using Rank Math:
- Go to Rank Math > Sitemap Settings in your WordPress dashboard.
- Ensure that only the relevant post types (like Posts and Pages) are selected for inclusion in the sitemap.
- Save the changes, and Rank Math will automatically regenerate the sitemap.
3. Submit the New Sitemap to Google Search Console
After regenerating the sitemap:
- Go to your Google Search Console account.
- Navigate to Sitemaps under the Index section.
- Remove the old sitemap if it’s still listed, then submit the new sitemap URL (usually
https://yourdomainname/sitemap_index.xml).
4. Monitor Your GSC Dashboard
After submitting the new sitemap, monitor your Google Search Console for any errors or issues. It may take some time for Google to re-crawl and index your pages correctly.
5. Check for Indexing Issues
If you still see unwanted URLs indexed:
- Use the URL Inspection Tool in GSC to check specific URLs and see why they are indexed.
- If necessary, you can request removal of specific URLs using the Removals tool in GSC.
Additional Resources
For more detailed guidance on fixing sitemap issues, you can refer to our articles:
If you need further assistance, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will take over and help you out. Thank you for raising this concern!
But after regenerating sitemap it still shows those spam pages in the sitemap. Before the the spam post it looks clean like which contains my regular post url. But now those url are not available there anymore. Only spam post’s are there.
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math support.
Can you please follow these steps?
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/
If the issue persists, please share the site URL so we can check this further.
Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you for you kind support. As you said I did all these before like cleared the cache file, flush the sitemap, remove malware form website. But still the site map contains those spammy posts which looks horrible. I already block those .htm spam post to further index through robots.txt. Below is my site, please check and suggest me solution to revert it back. Already lost lots of traffic.
https://dreamscribes.com
Hello,
The sub-sitemaps are not being generated by our plugin. It seems like either the malware is still present on the site or your sitemaps are heavily cached. Please check with your host and ask them to clear server-side cache.
Let us know how that goes. Looking forward to your update.
Server-side cache cleared from hostinger. Can you have a look now.
Hello,
Your posts in your sitemaps are still not coming from Rank Math.
Please check this issue with your web host to check for any malware or post-sitemap XML files in your website files.
Looking forward to helping you.
Already talked to hostinger support team and they said the sitemap is generated by Rankmath. Suggest me some solutions.
Hello,
Your sitemaps are now opening fine.
You may remove all your submitted sitemaps in your Google Search Console account and resubmit your main sitemap only /sitemap_index.xml
Once done, give Google some time to recrawl your site.
Looking forward to helping 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.
