Sitemap error

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with your sitemap. The error message indicating that your sitemap appears to be an HTML page suggests that there might be a misconfiguration or a conflict causing the sitemap to not generate correctly.

Here are some steps you can take to troubleshoot and resolve this issue:

1. Check the Sitemap URL: Ensure that you are submitting the correct sitemap URL to Google Search Console. The correct URL should be something like `https://rankmath.com/kb/check-plugin-conflicts/.

2. Validate Your Sitemap: Use the Validate XML Sitemap tool to check if your sitemap is correctly configured. If there are issues, the tool will provide feedback on what needs to be fixed.
   

3. Flush Permalinks: Sometimes, flushing permalinks can resolve issues with sitemaps. Go to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Settings → Permalinks, and simply click Save Changes without making any changes.

4. Check for Plugin Conflicts: There may be a plugin conflict causing the issue. You can use the Health Check plugin to identify any conflicts.

5. Disable Caching: If you are using caching plugins, try clearing the cache or temporarily disabling them to see if that resolves the issue.

6. Inspect robots.txt: Ensure that your robots.txt file is not blocking access to your sitemap. You can check this in Rank Math SEO → General Settings → robots.txt.

7. Custom Canonicals: If you have set custom canonical URLs for your posts, it may affect their appearance in the sitemap. Consider removing custom canonicals to allow Rank Math to generate them automatically.

If these steps do not resolve the issue, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will assist you further.

Thank you for raising this concern!

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

Can you please share your sitemap URL with us so that we can check the issue further for you?

Meanwhile, 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/

Once done, clear your website cache, remove all the submitted sitemap, and resubmit only the /sitemap_index.xml in the Search Console.

Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.