X-Robots-Tag NO INDEX

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

You don’t need to remove the X-Robots-Tag nor the No-Index tag (since you are not looking to index the sitemap, it is only something Google and other search engines will look for explicitly).

So you should be able to add your sitemap to Google Search Console without any error. But remember, your sitemap URL should be like this one: https://domain.com/sitemap_index.xml

Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.

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Hi Mark,

I am sorry but we do not have an option to remove that tag from Sitemaps.

With that said, even if you use any other SEO – the result will be similar. You can check this ticket about another SEO plugin and read that it is actually recommended to have sitemap files set to noindex:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/remove-x-robots-tag-noindex/

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

Hi Mark,

Umm, I am not sure you understand the point. It is set to noindex on purpose.

Making it indexable is WRONG. Why would we add an option in the plugin to hurt your rankings and SERPs?

Can you imagine someone reaching your sitemap via SERPS? All they would see is a bunch of URLs. They would bounce back and Google will see that a negative sign about your website since it would cause a high bounce rate.

If you want Google to index your sitemap, you may want to look into how you can create HTML sitemap on your website.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the reply.

You can navigate to Rank Math > Dashboard and disable the Sitemap module instead of deactivating the whole plugin and missing out on all the useful features.

This will then make it possible to add another sitemap plugin that contains the customizable options that you are after.

Let us know if we can help in any other way. Thank you.