Hello,
Thank you for contacting us. We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused.
Please try to follow the steps below and see if that works for you.
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. If the above steps don’t seem to work, kindly apply the following filter to your site.
add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');
Here’s how you can add a filter/hook to your WordPress site: https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/
Once done, clear your website cache and any server-side cache, then check the sitemap.
Meanwhile, you shouldn’t be worried about the “No: “noindex” detected in the HTTP header “X-Robots-Tag” error, as it’s completely fine and normal to have noindex tag on your sitemap URLs.
Because, by default, sitemap URLs are set to noindex as it is not meant to be indexed and appear in the search results. The sitemap should only be submitted in the sitemaps section in the Search Console.
The reason is that we don’t want Google to index the sitemap itself; we only want Google to index the pages and posts that are listed on the sitemap. The sitemap is simply a way to inform Google about the pages and posts on your website, not a page that you want to appear in search results.
Regarding the redirect, please ensure that you are using an updated version of the Rank Math plugin.
If the issue persists regarding the error after updating the plugin, you must have received an email from WordPress with the details about the error. Please share it with us here so we can check and assist you further.
If you haven’t received the email with the error code, you can follow this guide to enable debugging in WordPress https://wordpress.org/support/article/debugging-in-wordpress/, or you can get in touch with your web host, and they will help you locate the log file.
Having an error log will help us determine what is causing the critical error on your website.
Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
