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Dear Rank Math Support Team,
I am experiencing an issue with sitemap generation for a specific Custom Post Type (CPT) on my website using the Rank Math plugin.
I have a CPT named “Seasons” with approximately 10,000 posts. In Rank Math’s Titles & Meta settings, I have globally set this CPT to “Noindex” by default.
For around 200 individual “Season” posts, I have manually overridden the meta settings to “Index”, since these are fully optimized for SEO.
However, the sitemap behavior is not matching expectations:
1. Multiple Sitemaps Created: The sitemap index includes 8 files for this CPT:
/seasons-sitemap1.xml
/seasons-sitemap2.xml
/seasons-sitemap3.xml
/seasons-sitemap4.xml
/seasons-sitemap5.xml
/seasons-sitemap6.xml
/seasons-sitemap7.xml
/seasons-sitemap8.xml2. Only First Sitemap Contains Valid Posts: Only seasons-sitemap1.xml contains the ~200 indexed posts. The rest (sitemap2.xml to sitemap8.xml) are completely empty or return 404 errors.
3. SEO Impact: These empty or invalid sitemaps are being crawled and reported as issues in Google Search Console, which can negatively affect site health and indexing performance.
Steps I’ve Taken So Far:
– Enabled “Include in Sitemap” for the Seasons CPT
– Flushed sitemap cache from Rank Math > Sitemap Settings
– Cleared server/CDN-level caches (e.g., WP Rocket / Cloudflare)
– Confirmed Rank Math plugin is fully up to date
– Verified global noindex settings and per-post index overridesExpected Behavior:
– Sitemaps should include only indexable URLs
– The number of generated sitemap files should correspond to the count of indexable posts, not all posts
– Empty sitemap files should not be created or listed in the sitemap indexCould you please review this issue and advise if it’s a bug or expected behavior?
If it’s a bug, I would appreciate a fix or workaround to prevent empty sitemaps from being generated or listed.Thank you for your support.
The ticket ‘Sitemap Generation Issue: Empty Sitemaps Created for Noindexed Custom Post Type’ is closed to new replies.