sitemap is showing error 404

Hello,

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

If the sitemap keeps returning a 404 error from time to time, it means it is getting cached. Please follow this guide to exclude the sitemap from being cached: https://rankmath.com/kb/exclude-sitemaps-from-caching/

Also, you should lower the number of the links per sitemap as Google responds better to smaller pages in sitemap: https://rankmath.com/kb/configure-sitemaps/#links-per-sitemap

Hope this helps. Let us know if you need any other assistance.

Hello,

For example, if you have 500 posts and set the links per sitemap to 200, your sitemaps will be something like this:

Yourdomain.com/post-sitemap1.xml = 1-200
Yourdomain.com/post-sitemap2.xml = 201-400
Yourdomain.com/post-sitemap3.xml = 401-500

To understand this, you should know that Google crawls small-sized sitemaps faster. With this in mind, Rank math uses the links per sitemap limit to break down sitemaps into smaller parts. You can also check Google’s guidelines for sitemaps:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/sitemaps/build-sitemap

I hope that helps.

Thank you.