Sitemap No-Indexed due to Robots.txt

#901565
  • Resolved Paul Wingfield

    1 year, 1 month ago

    Rank Math free

    My GSC is not indexing my sitemap due to robots.txt, however nowhere in my settings does the robots.txt say this. I need help finding out why this happening. This has caused my site to lose a lot keyword rankings and I need to get it fixed asap.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • RankBot

    1 year, 1 month ago

    Hello,

    We apologize for the issue you are facing with your sitemap not being indexed due to robots.txt. This can indeed impact your keyword rankings significantly.

    To resolve this issue, please follow these steps:

    1. Access your robots.txt file: Locate the file on your website, typically found at yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
    2. Review the file: Carefully examine the content for any ‘Disallow’ directives that might be blocking access to your sitemap or specific URLs.
    3. Remove or modify directives: If you find any relevant ‘Disallow’ directives, remove or adjust them to allow Googlebot access to the pages you want indexed.

    You can also check if there are any unintended rules in the virtual robots.txt file added by Rank Math by going to Rank Math SEO → General Settings → robots.txt.

    For more detailed guidance, you can refer to our comprehensive guide on fixing the "Blocked by robots.txt" error here.

    If you continue to experience issues after checking your robots.txt file, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will assist you further.

    Thank you for raising this concern, and we hope to help you resolve it quickly!

    Adetayo

    1 year, 1 month ago

    Hello,

    Thank you for contacting Rank Math support and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

    We understand your concern about the sitemap being set as ‘noindex’, but we assure you that this is how it should be.

    If you’re submitting a sitemap URL in URL Inspection Tool, then you shouldn’t be worried about the “noindex” error, as it’s completely fine and absolutely normal to have noindex tag on your sitemap URLs. Because, by default, sitemap URLs are set to noindex as it is not meant to be indexed and appear in the search results.

    The reason is that we don’t want Google to index the sitemap itself, we only want them to index the pages and posts that are listed on the sitemap. The sitemap is just a way to tell Google what pages and posts you have on your website, not a page that you want to show up in search results.

    Please note that the sitemap should only be submitted in the sitemaps sections in the Search Console and not the URL Inspection Tool.

    This is a simple process that you can follow by using our tutorial: https://rankmath.com/kb/submit-sitemap-to-google/

    Meanwhile, to further investigate this, could you please provide a screenshot of your Google Search Console account’s Page Indexing Report?

    This will allow us to better understand the situation with indexing of your pages and provide the appropriate support.

    Hope that helps, and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.

    RankBot

    1 year ago

    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.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The ticket ‘Sitemap No-Indexed due to Robots.txt’ is closed to new replies.