Hello,
Thanks for contacting us, and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
The sitemap generates on the fly in Rank Math, when you enable that module. We rely on redirects enabled by your server software to accomplish that. If the Sitemap doesn’t work, you may have to add some rewrite rules to them in order to function sitemaps properly.
If you visit the /?sitemap=1 or /sitemap_index.xml URI on your site (or any of the sitemaps under it, such as /page-sitemap.xml) and view the source code of your sitemap and child sitemap pages, you can see that the XML sitemap itself is working, but the linked XSL file is not – /main-sitemap.xsl returns a 404. We can only access that with the direct URI that looks like this: /?xsl=main.
So the issues are basically that /?xsl=main should be rewritten to /main-sitemap.xsl (the rewrite pattern looks like this: '/([a-z]+)?-?sitemap\.xsl$/' => '?xsl=$1').
These issues are most likely related to your server configuration. So, I suggest you to get in touch with your hosting provider regarding this issue.
Besides, I’d like to add that the only purpose of the XSL file is to make the sitemap “human-readable” so in terms of SEO it doesn’t make a difference. Google will still see the sitemap correctly on sitemap_index.xml, even without the XSL. So, if you send in the correct /sitemap_index.xml to Google in Search Console, then the XSL isn’t important either.
In other words, these issues will not hurt your SEO.
Hope that helps, and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Thank you.
Thank you for this detailed response. We really appreciate it.
Hello,
We are super happy that this resolved your issue. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.
If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.
If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.
Thank you.
