Switching from www to non-www, sitemap blank

#427621
  • Resolved Alexis
    Rank Math free

    Hello,

    We have been like 6 years using the WWW version of our website and now we did change it to the non-www version.

    For some reason, the sitemap is not working anymore.

    We have redirected our website from www to non-www and everything is working but the sitemap with www loads blank instead of redirecting to the non-www version of the sitemap.

    Also, we would like to ask you guys how do you think we need to proceed in this case:

    Should we add the new non-WWW sitemap in our search console (domain property) and delete the WWW version of it, or we just keep both until Google re-index all the content again?

    Thank you very much!

    Best regards,
    Alex.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Prabhat
    Rank Math agency

    Hello,

    Thank you for contacting the support and we regret the inconvenience caused.

    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. Exclude the Sitemap files of the Rank Math plugin in your caching plugin. The cache could be via a plugin or from the server. For plugins or Cloudflare, please follow this article:
    https://rankmath.com/kb/exclude-sitemaps-from-caching/

    3. Clear your website and browser’s cache and check the sitemaps to see if the issue gets fixed.

    As for your second question, if you’ve already implemented the non-WWW variation, you can remove the WWW sitemaps from your Google Search Console account and only submit the index sitemap (/sitemap_index.xml) of the non-WWW variation.

    As for the redirection, please try using the rules in this guide and see if it helps: https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-redirect-www-urls-to-non-www/

    Let us know how that goes.

    Thank you.

    Alexis
    Rank Math free

    Hello,

    Well, after following your instructions the issue still persists.

    Non-WWW sitemap works, but WWWW does not.

    It is not an important issue I guess because the non-WWW is the variation we need to use in our website from now on, but I’m wondering if the WWW sitemap loading blank will cause any problems to Google.

    We’ve removed the WWW sitemap from the Search Console.

    Prabhat
    Rank Math agency

    Hello,

    As you’ve submitted the new sitemaps to GSC, that sitemap would start to get crawled from now.

    However, you can reach out to your web host and see if there’s any issue or solution they have to redirect the WWW version of the sitemaps to non-WWW.

    Let us know how that goes.

    Thank you.

    Alexis
    Rank Math free

    Hi,

    Since I was using Cloudflare, I added a new rule to redirect my website from www to non-www and then the www sitemap is redirecting properly to the non-www variation.

    I don’t know if it was the real issue but it is working. Since now Cloudflare is doing the redirection, I removed it from the htaccess.

    Thank you.

    Prabhat
    Rank Math agency

    Hello,

    I checked and the sitemap is correctly redirecting to the preferred variation.

    If there’s anything else that we can assist you with, please feel free to let us know.

    Thank you.

    Alexis
    Rank Math free

    That’s all,

    Thank you very much for you attention.

    Best,
    Alex.

    Hello,

    We are super happy that we could address your concern. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.

    If you don’t mind me 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 do 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.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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