Pre-Sale question: Massive SEO problems with Rank Math

#720429
  • Resolved Anonymous

    1 year, 8 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hi,
    I was in contact with Bhanu who advised me to open a support ticket and resend my message for a better and quick response by your 24/7 support — so here we go 🙂

    I really wanted to try RankMath and maybe switch from Yoast to RankMath (esp. for having several focus keywords and local SEO integrated) and probably RankMath Business.
    But I am lost with the very bad SEO results of the following website that was my first try with RankMath: https://dieter-jung.com/
    It is a friend’s artist website, and I am desperate by now since we haven’t been able to get proper SEO scores for over a month now, and an important exhibition of him is opening this weekend (had tried to solve this myself, should have asked you earlier :-/ ).

    I have been working with Yoast SEO for more than ten years now, and it’s always worked well. I am not a SEO professional, but I’ve managed basic SEO in a way that sites were properly indexed and scored OK on Google.

    The site uses WP with a page builder (Avada) and ACF (RankMath ACF module is activated) for custom layouts like posts etc., nothing fancy plugin- or theme-wise.
    I haven’t linked the site to GA4 (yet) for GDPR-reasons, but that should be independent of the problems listed below.

    There are several major problems, here the top 3 (there’s many more … :-/ ):
    1) Sitemaps are not indexed properly: https://dieter-jung.com/sitemap_index.xml –> How can that be?
    I checked the SEO Analyzer which gives fairly OK results (apart from the images that I still need to work on (size, titles, ALT-tags, OpenGraph Thumbnail).
    [UPDATE –> By re-submitting the sitemaps, three of them were detected now. However, https://dieter-jung.com/post-sitemap.xml still says “couldn’t be read” – although the link “open sitemap” in the search console leads to https://dieter-jung.com/post-sitemap.xml which shows that something is there.]
    2) Mobile Snapshot not available
    3) Extremely bad SEO Scores for pages (e. g. 18 / 100 for a biography page; see screenshot attached). Some of the gallery pages have the problem of not delivering text but only images. But e.g. the above mentioned biography page https://dieter-jung.com/biographie/ is causing me headaches SEO-wise since I can’t explain these extremely poor scores.

    I’m going to book your SEO course as well, but for the urgent now, any quick help and advice would be most appreciated!

    Thanks a lot in advance
    Denise

    P.S. A quick UX-hint for your SEO course (see screenshot for details): When I did the three free lessons and reached the fourth one by clicking “next”, there was only a message that it’s not free – but there was no information about the course price, and no CTA/button to immediately book it.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Jeremy

    1 year, 8 months ago

    Hello,

    Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.

    1. Please note that sitemaps aren’t meant to be indexed as you don’t want your sitemap to appear on the search page. Here’s the proper way to submit your sitemaps to your Google Search Console: https://rankmath.com/kb/submit-sitemap-to-google/

    As for the sitemaps not being read by Google, please follow the steps below:

    Step 1. Flush the Sitemap cache by following this video screencast:
    https://i.rankmath.com/pipRDp

    Step 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/

    Step 3. Apply the following filter code to your site.

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

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

    Step 4. After that, remove all your sitemaps from your GSC and resubmit them.

    2. This could be just a temporary issue, please clear your website cache and head over to your WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > Status & Tools > Database Tools and click on the button “Clear SEO Analyzer”. After that, re-run the SEO Analyzer again. See if this will update the report.

    Also, we’ve checked your website in our external SEO Analyzer, and it returns a server error. Can you please check the steps from here and see if this resolves the issue?

    3. Please note that Avada Fusion builder is not fully compatible with Rank Math and which is why some tests are incorrect because of the way they add them to the content. In this case, You can contact the developer of Avada Fusion builder by showing the following link:
    https://rankmath.com/kb/content-analysis-api/

    Also, in our plugin, the content needs to contain the exact focus keyword you have entered. Unlike Yoast or other SEO plugins which are forgiving when it comes to matching the keywords with more than 1 word or stop words in their tests, Rank Math needs to have an exact match.

    At the moment, we don’t have immediate plans to change this behavior but if this is something we can change in the future, we will be sure to let you know.

    You may refer to more on this guide: https://rankmath.com/kb/score-100-in-tests/

    That said, having a mismatch of keywords on our Content analysis will not cause any ranking issue as long as you have used the keyword in a natural and relevant manner on your posts.

    4. Can you please confirm if you are referring to the keyword you have added in the homepage or are you talking about the common keywords you see in the SEO Analyzer?

    Looking forward to helping you.

    Anonymous

    1 year, 8 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hi Jeremy,
    Thanks so much for your help.
    Resubmitting the sitemaps worked (after flushing the cache and excluding the sitemaps from WP Rocket cache).
    What didn’t work was the adding the filter via rank-math.php in my theme folder – it made the site crash. Maybe an error in the php-file? https://pastebin.com/52yCqsDF

    I’ll go through all the steps of the SEO Analyzer again to see whether I can improve the site’s visibility, hoping to get better results soon.

    Thanks again, and best regards
    Denise

    Ike

    1 year, 7 months ago

    Hello,

    It appears the code you added is not the same as what was given above. You ended it with extra content that is not part of the given code
    }); .

    In the example you followed the closing parenthesis, bracket, and semicolon are part of the code.

    Only add:
    add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');

    Let us know how this goes. Please let us know if you have further questions or concerns.

    Thank you.

    RankBot

    1 year, 6 months ago

    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.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

The ticket ‘Pre-Sale question: Massive SEO problems with Rank Math’ is closed to new replies.