In fact, the “updated” date error aside, there is a bigger error in this “virtual sitemap” creation:
id 3075 (blog page) is excluded in settings, and yet it’s clearly being shown in the sitemap.
So then what’s the exclusion list for?
Has someone figured out?
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
But currently there is no way to see WHY the plugin insists on showing outdated sitemaps: eg 2019-02-24 12:34 +00:00
I donāt even see where the plugin got that date from: On that date NONE of our pages, posts, custom post type, or excluded post list got updated.
The date is the last modified date of the posts/page. Can you explain, what do you mean by outdated Sitemap? Rank Math orders posts/pages in the Sitemap by the last modified date.
The second we save your āSitemap settingsā (with new exclusions, think) the sitemaps should ALL be updated right away. But arenāt.
Whenever you update any Sitemap Settings or Post/Pages, the Sitemap updates right away, this is how it should work. Please clear cache or check in incognito mode.
In fact, the āupdatedā date error aside, there is a bigger error in this āvirtual sitemapā creation:
id 3075 (blog page) is excluded in settings, and yet itās clearly being shown in the sitemap.
This again looks like a cache issue to me. I checked it on my setup the post is getting excluded properly.
If you could share your WP logins, I would love to take a look for you.
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
Thank you Pratek.
“The date is the last modified date of the posts/page.”
No, misunderstanding, not the dates IN the sitemaps, I meant the dates OF the sitemaps you create:
– back then we neither had your plugin
– nor done any changes whatsoever.
So, those dates are unexplained.
Either way, Bhanu kindly replied just now as well: For anyone experiencing similar issue, this it what works, add this anywhere in your functions.php:
add_filter(‘rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching’,’__return_false’);
While excluding the sitemaps in the caching plugin (w3tc) does not work.
Also I noticed that RankMath’s subfolder “sitemap-cache” cannot be listed in ftp: it’s the only folder there that has file permissions set to 644, the others all are 755. No idea why we may not list that folder…?
And really, NO, post id 3075 (/blog page: the one that lists posts as timeline) IS excluded BUT RM insists to include it in the sitemap nonetheless. Again, no idea why…?
It clearly is NOT a “caching issue”: w3tc isn’t allowed to cache RM, and now with Bhanu’s functions.php exclusion there isn’t even a transient cache for it. I wouldn’t know what other “cache” you might mean?
Either way, thanks for replying at all š
Hello,
āThe date is the last modified date of the posts/page.ā
No, misunderstanding, not the dates IN the sitemaps, I meant the dates OF the sitemaps you create:
ā back then we neither had your plugin
ā nor done any changes whatsoever.
So, those dates are unexplained.
Every post has a modified date, even if the plugin was not installed before it takes the existing post_modified date of each post and orders the post accordingly.
And really, NO, post id 3075 (/blog page: the one that lists posts as timeline) IS excluded BUT RM insists to include it in the sitemap nonetheless. Again, no idea whyā¦?
It clearly is NOT a ācaching issueā: w3tc isnāt allowed to cache RM, and now with Bhanuās functions.php exclusion there isnāt even a transient cache for it. I wouldnāt know what other ācacheā you might mean?
This is strange. It seems to be working fine on our setup. If you could share your WP logins in the Sensitive Data Section, I would love to take a look and fix it for you.
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
“Every post has a modified date,” Of course yes, and I said twice “on the dates that RM shows for the sitemaps it has created, NO post/page got updated”, absolutely nothing changed the entire week at least.
So there you have another “that’s strange” š
“If you could share your WP logins” HUUUUHHHH, WHAT??
Could you please share your login details first?
—
PS: Ah, now you realize: No sensible person would be so daft to share the business’ login details!
Hence why such question stumps me everytime.
When I want to help s.o. I help without login details, obviously. I say where to look for what. š
Nonetheless, don’t get this wrong: I appreciate your will to help, so thanks again Pratik.
FYI: Make a static page the homepage (under wp settings) and their “blog page” the posts page. Then you should see like I do that RM does not respect the exclusion of the “blog page”.
I thought it’s wise to exclude that “summary of blog posts” page, but who knows, maybe it’s wrong anyway…
Hello,
If an issue cannot be reproduced by us, and we don’t know what could be causing it, we often ask for access to the user’s site, since there is no other way to troubleshoot the issue. This can be a temporary account, and you could even set up a user activity monitoring plugin on your site (or something similar on the server-level), so you know exactly what we are doing on your site. Creating a staging copy of your site on a subdomain would also work.
This is standard procedure in the world of premium WordPress products, but of course we understand if you would rather not do this.
I have now tried this on a test site: I created a static homepage “Home”, and another page to show the posts, “Blog”, and set up WordPress accordingly. I verified that the sitemap does include the “Blog” page. Then I added the ID of the “Blog” page in Rank Math > Sitemap Settings > General > Exclude Posts, and checked the sitemap. The Blog page does NOT appear in the sitemap anymore.
As we cannot reproduce the issue, we can only speculate about it. My colleague mentioned the cache because it is often the cause of such issues. Caching can be done by a plugin, or it could also happen on the server-level and you may not even be aware of it.
By the way, I don’t really see a good reason to exclude the “Blog” page from your sitemap, except if you also noindex it.
Hope that helps. If you have any question, please feel free to ask. Thank you.
