My score goes down instead of going higher

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.

Could you please share the affected URL (if already published) so we can check? Also, are you using a page builder on your site? If so, please share the name of the builder as well.

On the other hand, please confirm if the changes are getting saved once you update/publish as it could also affect the scores when the page is reloaded.

Let us know how this goes.

Thank you.

Hello,

Could you please share the keyword you have used on the 2nd URL?

Meanwhile, please note that Rank Math looks for the exact match of the focus keyword you have set and the ones you have used in your headings/content.

Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.

Hello,

We might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress & FTP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.

Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.

It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/

You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/

Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.

Hello,

We checked your sitemap and we can see that it is working properly except wpbdp_listing-sitemap.xml which is returning 404.

In this case, please follow the steps below and see if that works for you:

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. If the above steps don’t seem to work, kindly apply the following filter to your site.

add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');

Here’s how you can add filter/hook to your WordPress site:
https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

Once done, clear your website cache and resubmit the /sitemap_index.xml in the Search Console.

Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.

Hello,

Please share the website login information in the sensitive data section of this ticket so we can check and investigate the issue further.

It is completely secure, and only our support staff has access to that section.

Also, please share the URL of the page you have optimized so we can check it as well.

Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.

Hello,

Since you are using Elementor, you should check the score and SEO tests inside Elementor’s editor as the complete content is rendered there and the analysis and SEO score you see inside is the accurate one:

The page builders use shortcodes to add the content and they are rendered only in their editor or front end. When you check the default editor, not all the elements load there and that’s why you see a different score.

Once you edit the page in Elementor and update it, the correct score will also be updated in the list view.

Hope that helps. Let us know if you need any other assistance.

Hello,

We are super happy that this resolved your issue. 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.