No: ‘noindex’ detected in ‘X-Robots-Tag’ http header

Hello,

Thank you so much for getting in touch.

As long as you have created the property in GSC and verified your website, your website should be ready to be indexed on the SERP. Here are some guides you can follow:

https://rankmath.com/kb/connect-your-google-account/
https://rankmath.com/kb/google-site-verification/
https://rankmath.com/kb/google-index/

As for your concern about the sitemap, this is not an issue as XML Sitemaps are designed to be crawled by search engines, not indexed. The X-Robots-Tag: noindex directive ensures that the sitemap itself does not appear in search results, but this does not prevent Google from crawling its contents and indexing the pages listed within it.

There’s no need to worry, as this is the expected behavior for sitemaps.

Please avoid submitting your XML sitemaps to Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool as that tool is meant for HTML pages.

You can properly submit your sitemap to your Google Search Console account by following this guide: https://rankmath.com/kb/submit-sitemap-to-google/

However, if you still wish to remove the noindex tag from your sitemap for any specific reason, you can use the filter in your site:

add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/http_headers', function( $headers ) {
	if ( '/sitemap_index.xml' !== $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ) {
		return $headers;
	}
	unset( $headers['X-Robots-Tag'] );
	return $headers;
} );

Here’s how you can add filter/hook to your WordPress site:
https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

Looking forward to helping you on this one.

Hello,

There could be some reasons Google is not indexing the affected URLs or pages.

Please provide a screenshot of your Google Search Console’s Page Indexing Report so we can check.

To share the screenshot, you can use a tool like https://imgur.com/. This will allow us to better understand the situation and provide the appropriate support.

You can also request the indexing of your pages by passing them through the URL Inspection Tool and requesting it there: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/ask-google-to-recrawl. The tool will also let you know if there are any issues with the website that prevent the pages from getting indexed.

Meanwhile, we have provided some guides you can follow to ensure your website keeps showing up on Google search results: https://rankmath.com/kb/google-index/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YYecHEIwMs

Don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.

Hello,

Please follow the steps below:

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. Apply 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/

4. Remove all your sitemaps from your Google Search Console and re-submit only the index sitemap (https://website.com/sitemap_index.xml)

This will ensure that your sitemaps are up to date and Google can see the updated content as well.

From your video screencast, the sitemaps are returning a “success” response, so it’s up to Google if they decide to crawl your website. This usually depends on your website authority.

As for the indexing issues, please request Google to index the URLs right away by clicking on the “REQUEST INDEXING” button.

Let us know how that goes. Looking forward to helpin you.