Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
About the HTML error, it could be happening due to being cached in your sitemaps. Are you using any caching plugin? If yes, which one?
In general, you should add these exceptions to you cache rules:
/(.*)sitemap(.*).xml
/(.*)sitemap.xsl
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
No I don’t have cache plugin installed. See the page here: https://ibb.co/9vGZLy6
Hello,
Assuming Google’s unable to fetch the Sitemap is a bug on their end. Please read here
https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/3280971?hl=en
It’s happening with other SEO plugins as well.
The most prominent reason behind that seems to be the introduction of the Indexing API
https://rankmath.com/blog/google-indexing-api/
Google has plans to drop the use of Sitemaps and allow indexing API.
With that said, if your Sitemap is opening fine and online tools, such as the below one, shows no error, you should be fine
https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html
With that said, always submit only the index of the Sitemap, which looks like this
https://rankmath.com/sitemap_index.xml
Hope that clears the confusion.
My other sites isn’t having this issues at all, even the old sites I have RM installed are all fine. But these two sites are recent ones.
And my sitemaps is showing error on the online tool you shared with me. See the image: https://ibb.co/bFXr5bN
Hello,
Your sitemap seems to be redirected to homepage, and it doesn’t seem to be by Rank math. Could you please check your .htaccess if you have any redirection that might be casuing this:
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
.htaccess? No I have not touch those areas before. 🙂
Not a techie man at all.
Hello,
Then, we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.
It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/
You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/
We really look forward to helping you.
Hello,
I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?
Thank you.
Thanks Alberto.
I’d updated the sensitive area with WP info
I’m having the exact same issue today and hoping to find some direction.
Hello,
In the first website, your sitemap was not generated, and since you had a plugin to automatically redirect 404 errors to the homepage. I disabled that plugin and then resaved the permalinks and the issue is solved.
About the second site, you were using a cache plugin. I added the sitemaps as cache exceptions and resaved the permalinks and also the issue is solved.
Looking forward to help you.
Thanks so much.
First let me ask if I can use Rank Math to automatically redirect all 404 to homepage instead of using a plugin?
My 1st Site: http://www.M…….t.com is now okay. The sitemap is working fine now.
But 404 to homepage plugin is still activated.
My 2nd Site: http://www.N…….S.com still showing sitemap issue. The sitemap is NOT working: “error: couldn’t fetch”.
But “All 404 Redirect to Homepage” plugin is deactivated.
Hello,
Yes you can redirect your 404s to homepage with Rank math. To do this please head over to Rank math > General Settings > Redirections and choose homepage for the fallback behavior.
It seems your caching plugin is still caching the sitemap for the second site. even though exclusion rules have already been added. Could you please clear your cache, resave permalinks then remove submitted sitemaps and resubmit only the main sitemap on GSC.
Looking forward to helping you.
Hello,
We are glad this resolved your issue.
Do you wish to close this thread?
If you have any further question(s), please let us know. 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.
