Hello,
I discovered that my sitemap issue – blank lines at the top of any page in View Source – was apparently being caused by my child theme, Hello Elementor Child. So twelve hours ago I activated a new child theme, to see if that solved the problem – and it did, temporarily. But now, 18 hours later, I see the problem is back, i.e. when I click on https://rolanditen.com/sitemap_index.xml
inside Rank Math admin area, I can no longer see my sitemap (which I could last night, for the first time ever, after making a new child theme). Instead there is that old error message: “This page contains the following errors:
error on line 4 at column 6: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.” (with nothing below it…)
This is actually a very big deal, because I discovered at the same time that whereas Rank Math had allowed me to set nearly all my pages to “Index” in the Advanced tab, without showing any problem, when I checked in Google Search Console last night, for the first time ever, I found 65 NoIndex errors! So in spite of what my Rank Math admin area was showing me (In Advanced tab of each page – but I can’t include my screenshot for you, why not?), MY NEW SITE HAS NOT BEEN INDEXED SINCE IT WENT LIVE! So I am assuming that has something to do with my sitemap refusing to generate.
If I had realized that my sitemap problem was hiding this much worse no-index problem, I would have dropped everything two weeks ago to try and fix it.
That is a HUGE problem. Last night, after I created a new child theme, and was subsequently able to see my sitemap, I had to restart a request for validation from Google Search Console. My request is still pending with Google, but now I find that the sitemap error is back, so I fear that the two issues are connected, and that Google will once again fail to index my site because it finds “no index” everywhere. I cannot go on making copies of my child theme indefinitely; at some point I need to know what is upsetting my entire Rank Math installation!
Can you confirm that a missing sitemap causes all the Indexes to be set to no-index without the user knowing about it? Or have I just been unlucky enough to have TWO major errors that are not connected?
Thanks if you can help. Sooner or later my client is going to blame me for the lack of visitors to the website.