Hello,
Thank you for contacting the support, and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
I checked your sitemap in my browser and it does seem to be working just fine. I also submitted it in an XML Sitemap Validator and no issues there as well.
To further troubleshoot this issue, please refer to this quick guide: https://rankmath.com/kb/couldnt-fetch-error-google-search-console/
After doing so, remove all your sitemap from GSC and re-submit your primary sitemap again.
Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.
Hi Jeremy
Thank you for your response; I have reset my Sitemap Settings and followed this tutorial more than once and still have issues. I submitted the same sitemap to BING with no issues, which confuses me further.
———————
Google Search Console is now showing:
Crawl Time: 28 Sept 2021, 11:23:46
Crawled as: Googlebot smartphone
Crawl allowed? Yes
Page fetch: Successful
Indexing allowed?: error
No: ‘noindex’ detected in ‘X-Robots-Tag’ http header
———————–
From this, it seems to be some ‘noindex’ instruction, but I have no idea where to find this. Inside RankMath my robots.txt has the following added…
——————-
Sitemap: https://labeltechniques.co.za/sitemap_index.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
——————-
Any additional advise?
Thanks
Hello,
It’s perfectly normal to have your sitemaps with this noindex directive as you wouldn’t want the actual sitemap on SERPs but rather the pages that it contains.
Google will still crawl the sitemap and try to index the pages present on it.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.
Hi Miguel
The fact that 2x XML Validation tools and Bing Search Console have passed/accepted the sitemap, I can now only assume this is a fault within Google Search Console.
I have searched the Search Console community pages and this seems to be a common problem that started appearing in 2019 already (first time I’ve experienced it though).
Seeing as it’s impossible to get hold of Google Support; I guess I will have to leave it and hope that Google sorts this out asap…
I will resolve this ticket and re-open it if necessary.
Thanks to you and Jeremy for your assistance.
Rgds
Duane
Hello,
Glad that helped. Please feel free to re-open this ticket if you face any issues. We are here to assist.
Thank you.
Hi Guys
Sorry to have to re-open this ticket; but I desperately need some help, please.
My clients rankings have tanked and his traffic is at ‘zero’, with no leads coming from his site.
I’m not sure if this is a RankMath issue or not, but I’ve tried everything else and simply cannot figure this out.
The sitemap is still inaccessible to Google Search Console;
The Google Schema Markup Test shows valid markup; but
The Rich Schema Test Tool show the ‘Page Cannot be Reached’
See: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results?id=JXu2e9552Usl_Qv5Wd3iEA
Please can you check the RankMath Setup for me, to make sure I have everything setup correctly before I challenge the Web Hosting Company again…
Thanks
Duane
Hello,
I’ve checked your robots.txt using the Robots validator tool, and it is showing 403 Forbidden error.
Upon further checking, you have some rewrite rules in your .htaccess file which might be the reason for that issue. You can check with your web host to see if they may have something blocking Google from accessing the robots.txt file.
You can also try using a default .htaccess file and check again. Here’s the link for your reference:
https://wordpress.org/support/article/htaccess/
I hope that helps.
Thank you.
Hi Reinelle
Thank you for taking the time to assist me with this. I will now challenge the Web Hosting Company as they denied it was an issue on their end.
Note: I have tried using a default .htaccess file already, which didn’t work, so it must be the hosting company.
Thanks again 🙂
Rgds
Duane
Hello,
If you need further help or with anything else, please open a new support ticket here so we can help.
We are always here for assistance.
