Hello,
Thank you for getting in touch with us.
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/
3. Check if your sitemap is working on your browser by going to yourdomain(.)com/sitemap_index.xml
If the sitemap is working fine, you can try validating it on this link: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html
If the validation works, please move to the next point.
4. Have you verified the correct version of your website on Google? Please check if you have verified the www (or non-www) and https (or http) version of your website. If there is a mismatch, please fix that.
5. Finally, head to your GSC and remove any submitted sitemap then resubmit only the main sitemap file(/sitemap_index.xml).
That should fix the issue. Please let me know if that does not. We are here to assist.
Thank you.
Thank you. I was able to do most of this. However I could not do #1 because there was no option to change the number of “links per sitemap” in my RankMath Sitemap Settings.
I did steps #2-5 without error per your instructions.
In looking at my “General” Sitemap setting it showed 2 sitemaps: 1 for posts and 1 for pages. But I assume that when I submitted the general sitemap to GSC in Step 5 that seems to include both posts and pages sitemaps?
I also noticed that RankMath has indicated 110 URLs for posts and 31 URLs for pages (141 total URLs), but GSC only indicated 133 in my general sitemap. So GSC appears to not be reading the updated Sitemap? Is this where clearing the cashing may come to play?
Additionally since submitting this inquiry I read that Google has had issue indexing since late September, with a Sept 23 update and a mid-October update related to “canonization and mobile indexing.” Do you know if these updates may be contributing the errors I am experiencing?
Overall it seems Google is not recognizing new posts and thus giving them no priority in ranking when the posts should be competitive based on keyword research and previous quick ranking of previous posts.
Thank you for your assistance.
Hello,
Thank you for the follow up.
As for the missing option in your sitemap settings, please note that some options are only available when you enable the Advanced Mode in Rank Math. You can switch to the Advanced Mode from the top-right corner at WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > Dashboard. Here is a screenshot for reference:https://i.rankmath.com/oMQ5Vj
To make Google crawl your sitemap again, can you please follow these steps?
1. Please delete the sitemaps from the Google Search Console.
2. Clear all cache and exclude the Sitemap files of the Rank Math plugin
3. Add sitemap_index.xml file again to your Google Search Console.
That should do the trick
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hello,
I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?
Thank 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.
