Hello,
Thank you for contacting the support and we regret the inconvenience caused.
I checked the robots.txt file of your website and you’ve not mentioned the sitemap URL in it. You can have a look at the screenshot in the sensitive data section for a quick reference.
While crawling the website, search engine bots look for the sitemap URL in the robots.txt and access them accordingly. Please add this statement at the end of your robots.txt file: Sitemap: https://your-domain.com/sitemap_index.xml (please replace ‘your-domain.com’ with your actual domain).
If you’re using Rank Math’s robots.txt, you can follow this guide to edit it: https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-edit-robots-txt-with-rank-math/
Also, upon testing the variations of your sitemaps with https://httpstatus.io/, I found that two variations are returning 200 status. You can have a look at the screenshot in the sensitive data section of this ticket.
Except for the preferred variation (which should return only a 200 status), all the non-preferred variations of the website should redirect to the preferred variation and return a 301 and 200 status.
Please follow the steps in this link:
https://rankmath.com/kb/couldnt-fetch-error-google-search-console/#num-5-check-for-the-correct-version-of-the-sitemap and redirect to the correct variation.
You can also get in touch with your web host regarding this.
Once done, please follow the below steps and see if that helps:
1. Flush the Sitemap cache by following this video screencast:
https://i.rankmath.com/pipRDp
2. Clear your website’s cache and remove all the sitemaps from your Google Search Console account, and then submit only the main sitemap: /sitemap_index.xml.
Further, give Google some time to crawl your website again and see if the issue gets fixed.
Hope this helps.
Thank you.
Thank you for the instructions. I will get back to you after taking the steps outlined.
Hello,
Let us know how it goes.
Meanwhile, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
We are here to assist you.
Hello,
I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?
Thank you.
So, After following your advice, We have deleted our WordPress robots.txt file and created a new one with Rankmath instead. Second We tested the variations on https://httpstatus.io
For 2 of the URLs we got 302 responses instead of 301.Is this normal? what should we do ?
I have attached a screenshot of the current results in the sensitive data section
Hello,
302 is a temporary redirection, it is recommended to have 301 redirections. However, I checked the variations and 2 of the variations still seem to be returning 200 status on my end. Please have a look at the screenshot in the sensitive data section.
Also, I checked the robots.txt and it seems to be the same. Could you please clear your website and server’s cache (if any) and let us know so that we can check again?
Looking forward to hearing back from you.
Thank you.
Hello,
I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?
Thank you.
Hi I have cleared the cache both from my site and server side. After doing that I also checked my site with https://httpstatus.io/.
I have attached the screenshot in the sensitive data section.
Thank you
Hello,
Unfortunately, I’m still seeing the same status. I also tested using different HTTP response tools and the same status is shown.
Please get in touch with your web host and ensure that only one variation returns the 200 status.
Once done, you can follow the next steps from my previous reply: https://support.rankmath.com/ticket/sitemap-not-fetching-in-gsc/?view=all#post-376966
Hope this helps.
Thank you.
Hi,
I have gotten in touch with my WebHost and working on solving this issue. Really appreciate all your help. Hopefully, I can get this resolved soon. I will update you on my progress when I’m done.
Hello,
I am glad that your web host is working on a solution to resolve the issue. Please do let us know how it goes. We will keep this ticket open for you.
In the meantime, please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Thank you.
Hi
After talking to our host we have figured out the issue. Our traffic is now slowly increasing and getting back to previous levels.
I would like to thank everyone on the support team for really helping us out. Your blog posts are some of the most helpful I have found for fixing issues. And the willingness of your team to help is just one of the best.
Cheers
Mighty Actor Team
Hello,
Thank you for the update.
We are super happy that this issue is already resolved. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.
If you don’t mind us asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.
If you have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.
Thank you.
