Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
The sitemap is usually set to noindex by default. You would not wish your sitemap to be appearing on the SERPs. However this doesn’t mean it won’t be crawled when correctly submitted.
To correctly submit your sitemap, on your GSC please head over to GSC and add your main sitemap only(/sitemap_index.xml). Let us know how it goes.
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
I submitted my sitemap correctly. As you advised me…and the robots.txt file is also fine. But whenever I submit sitemap in GSC it shows ‘fetching error’…
Google says It’s for X-robots-tag.
Then I checked my .htaccess & header.php file. But there was no code like X-robots-tag……
I think you understand my problem…
Thank you
I submitted my sitemap correctly. As you advised me…and the robots.txt file is also fine. But whenever I submit sitemap in GSC it shows ‘fetching error’…
Google says It’s for X-robots-tag.
Then I checked my .htaccess & header.php file. But there was no code like X-robots-tag……
I think you will understand my problem…
Thank you
Hello,
Thank you for the follow up.
Could you please share your sitemap URL so we can test and check from our end. You can also validate your sitemap here: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
Hello,
You seem to be using Cloudfare, please ensure you have added rules to exclude your sitemap URLs from being cached.
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 helps. 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.
