Hello,
I’m sorry to hear that you’re experiencing issues with your sitemap. The “Couldn’t fetch” error in Google Search Console can be quite frustrating.
To troubleshoot this issue, there are a few steps you can take to ensure that your sitemap is set up correctly. First, you can try renaming the sitemap file as suggested by John Mueller. You can do this by heading over to Indexing → Sitemaps in Google Search Console and adding a new sitemap with the URL `https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/w3-total-cache-settings/#uaGroups?utm_campaign=RankMath
If that doesn’t resolve the issue, you can also flush the sitemap cache and exclude the sitemap from caching. These steps can be performed within the Rank Math SEO plugin by navigating to Rank Math SEO → Sitemap Settings.
Additionally, you may want to check for any unintended rules in your robots.txt file or plugin conflicts that could be causing the issue.
If none of these steps resolve the problem, please let us know, and we’ll be happy to assist you further.
You can find more detailed information on how to diagnose and fix potential sitemap errors in this knowledgebase article.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or need further assistance.
Sources:
Troubleshooting the “Couldn’t Fetch” Error in Google Search Console » Rank Math
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
How to Configure Sitemaps in Rank Math – Best Settings and Tips
Why the Sitemap_Index.xml is Throwing a 404 Error » Rank Math
The problem hasn’t resolved.
I need further assist.
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
We’ve checked your sitemap but didn’t find any issue there.
Can you please share a screenshot of the sitemap section on your Google Search Console account?
Then, please follow the steps below to 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 code to your site.
add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');
Here’s how you can add filter/hook to your WordPress site:
https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/
#4. After that, remove all sitemaps from your Google Search Console and resubmit only the primary one (https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml)
If the issue persists, let us know here.
Looking forward to helping you.
Hello,
The Crawl-Delay command allows you to ask crawlers to wait a few seconds before crawling pages of your site. In this case, the “Crawl-Delay: 20“, is asking the robots of the search engine(s) concerned to wait 20 seconds between each page they crawl.
This command is used to communicate to crawlers to slow down crawling in order not to overload the web server.
For the sitemap, try removing and resubmitting your sitemap to Google. This may clear the errors and refresh the status of your sitemap. Here are the steps to do that:
- Go to Google Search Console and log in to your account.
- Select your website from the property list.
- Go to Sitemaps on the left menu.
- Select your sitemap from the list and click on More Actions > Remove Sitemap.
- Wait for a few minutes and then resubmit your sitemap by entering its URL and clicking on Submit. Make sure you’re not adding the www-version of your sitemap as that is not available
Hope this helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.
Thank you.
Hello,
Thank you for your reply.
I sorry that I’ve tried the method you taught me but still didn’t work.
Recently, some of my articles have sudden drop to zero traffic. But those aritcles were indexed and can be searched on google before. Also it’s not look like penalty of any kind from Google.
I’m just wondering is it related to the sitemap issue? or should I just do nothing and wait the sitemap goes back to normal by itself?
Thank you.
Hello,
As regards the drop in search traffic, we suggest you check your Google Search Console, coverage section to determine any issues reported on your site:
https://support.artlogic.net/hc/en-gb/articles/360016851260-Google-Search-Console-errors-and-coverage-issues
If there are any issues, then please share those with us here, and we’ll be assisting you with our best effort. You can also use a tool like Imgur to share screenshots of those errors with us.
Since there have been a few algorithm updates that came from Google, you can also monitor Google Algorithm updates and ranking drops. Check if you’ve been hit by an Algorithm update of Google: https://rankmath.com/kb/google-algorithm-updates/
If it seems like you may have been affected by an algorithm update, please refer to the following guidelines on how to confirm that and fix it: https://rankmath.com/blog/google-algorithm-update-recovery/.
2.
Concerning the sitemap issue, it appears the crawl delay in the robots.txt might be hindering Googlebot from being able to crawl the posts efficiently. You could consider configuring your robots.txt to the following:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Sitemap: https://rankmath.com/sitemap_index.xml
Remember to replace rankmath.com with your website’s domain.
To use Rank Math to manage your robots.txt, please refer to this guide: https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-edit-robots-txt-with-rank-math/
Let us know how this goes. Please let us know if you have further questions or concerns.
Thank you.
Hello,
Thank you for your reply again.
Although I’ve tried the method you taught me, the problem still exist.
Here’s the screenshot of Google Search Console and RankMath.
https://imgur.com/a/qSy7SxO
By the way, I didn’t see any Google’s search engine algorithm mark on the graph.
So I’m not sure if it been hit by an Algorithm update or not.
if it been hit by an Algorithm update， is it a good way to repost the article with another url and inspect on google console again?
Please feel free to contact me if you need further information.
Thank you.
Hello,
Your robots.txt appears to be the same:
We can see 3 errors in the image you shared. Please refer to the following guides for them.
– Page with redirect: https://rankmath.com/kb/page-with-redirect/
– Alternate page with proper canonical tag: https://rankmath.com/kb/alternate-page-with-proper-canonical-tag/
– Discovered – currently not indexed: https://rankmath.com/kb/discovered-currently-not-indexed/
We hope this helps. Please let us know if you have further questions or concerns.
Thank you.
Hello,
I checked the google console and the problem has been resloved.
Thank you for your help!
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.
