Sitemap Indexing Issue

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with indexing your sitemap. It can be frustrating when your sitemap is not being indexed despite your efforts. Here are some steps you can take to troubleshoot the "Couldn’t fetch" error in Google Search Console:

1. Validate Your Sitemap

Make sure your sitemap is correctly configured. You can validate it using the Validate XML Sitemap tool. If there are no issues detected, you should see a success message.

2. Ensure the Sitemap is Located in the Root Folder

Check that your sitemap is located in the root folder of your WordPress installation. The URL should look like this:
https://yourdomainname.com/sitemap_index.xml

3. Check Your Posts Are Set to Index

Ensure that your posts are set to index. Go to Rank Math SEO → Titles & Meta and enable the Index checkbox in the Robots Meta settings.

4. Add the Sitemap to Google Search Console

Make sure you have added the correct sitemap URL in Google Search Console under Indexing → Sitemaps. If you haven’t done so, paste the sitemap URL and click SUBMIT. Ensure there are no spaces in the URL.

If you still encounter the "Couldn’t fetch" error, try adding a forward slash before the sitemap URL and submit it again.

5. Check Server Configuration

If your sitemap still does not work, it may be due to server configuration issues. If you are using an Apache or Nginx server, you may need to add specific rewrite rules to your .htaccess or Nginx config file respectively. You can find more details on how to do this in our articles:

• My Sitemap Is Not Working on My Apache Web Server
• My Sitemap Is Not Working on My Nginx Web Server

6. Wait for Google to Fetch Your Sitemap

Sometimes, it may take time for Google to fetch your sitemap. If everything seems correct, you might just need to wait a bit longer.

If you’ve tried all these steps and are still having issues, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from our support team will assist you further.

Thank you for raising this concern, and we hope this helps resolve your issue!

Sources:
Troubleshooting the “Couldn’t Fetch” Error in Google Search Console » Rank Math
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math

Hello,

Thank you for contacting support.

Please share the website where this issue is happening so we can check the sitemap and make sure that everything is correctly being reported to search engines.

Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Hello,

You mentioned you’re using Rank Math PRO but your account here is showing Rank Math Free .You might have used a different email address when you bought the plugin. If so, please send us a copy of your receipt from FastSpring.com. You can search your inbox for an email from them – please share the email with us so we can verify your purchase and update your account. You can share images with us by uploading them to an image hosting site like Imgur, and then sharing the generated URL with us here.

That said, we can see that your Rank Math sitemap is loading and working fine, and we can see that Google has already indexed some of your pages.

If you’re having issues getting Google to index a specific page, you can use your the URL Inspection Tool to manually submit the URL to be indexed.

We appreciate your cooperation and we hope to hear from you soon.

Hello,

It seems that you already marked this ticket as “Resolved”. Do you still need our assistance regarding this issue?

Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.

Hello,

Unfortunately, the screenshot URLs you’ve shared are not valid. Please use any image-sharing tool like https://imgur.com/upload to share the screenshots with us.

Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.

Hello,

Please use any other platform for sharing images that is available in your country to share the images with us to illustrate the issue you are referring to.

Thank you.