Incorrect http header content-type: “text/html; charset=UTF-8” !! Help me !!

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

You should check the sitemap URL in the XML Validator tool, not your website URL:

We checked your sitemap and we can see it is working properly without any issues. In this case, 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/

Once done, clear your website cache, remove all the submitted sitemap, and resubmit only the /sitemap_index.xml in the Search Console.

However, it looks like you’re currently using the Rank Math PRO plugin on your websites, 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.

Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.

Hello,

That URL of the sitemap of the website should return a noindex status code because you wouldn’t want to index the sitemaps from your website, but rather only the pages that are inside the sitemap.

That directive on the sitemap prevents it from appearing on SERPs but it doesn’t prevent Google from crawling the pages on it and indexing them.

If you test any sitemap, even from big websites you’ll see that all of them use this directive to be sure it’s not getting included on SERPs.

Even our own sitemap includes that:

To submit the sitemap to the correct place on GSC you should follow the steps in this tutorial: https://rankmath.com/kb/submit-sitemap-to-google/

The only reason you would receive an issue with the content type headers is if you have the sitemap being cached and to prevent that we recommend the transient method from the tutorial we shared previously on how to prevent the caching of the sitemap.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.

Hello,

As we already mentioned it is absolutely fine if your sitemap is set to Noindex. From the SEO perspective, your sitemap doesn’t have any content value that you want to index on Google’s SERPs and show you visitors.

A sitemap is just a file that lists all the important pages of a website to help search engines like Google understand its structure and content which Google can easily crawl even if it is set to Noindex.

If you submit your sitemap on Google Search Console’s Sitemap section and Google can fetch that then there is nothing to worry about that.

Regarding the Yoast, if you check their sitemap, you’ll see it is also set to Noindex:

Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.
 
Thank you.