Hello,
Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
That URL of the sitemap of the website should return a noindex status code because you wouldn’t want to index the sitemaps from your website, but rather only the pages that are inside the sitemap.
That directive on the sitemap prevents it from appearing on SERPs but it doesn’t prevent Google from crawling the pages on it and indexing them.
If you test any sitemap, even from big websites you’ll see that most use this directive to be sure it’s not getting included on SERPs.
To submit the sitemap to the correct place on GSC you should follow the steps in this tutorial: https://rankmath.com/kb/submit-sitemap-to-google/
Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.
Thank you.
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.
