Hello,
Thank you for reaching out to us regarding the issue with your sitemap. It seems like you are experiencing a problem where new posts are replacing old posts on your sitemap, resulting in only the latest 200 posts being displayed.
To resolve this issue, you can follow these steps:
-
Exclude Posts and Pages from the Sitemap:
- Navigate to WordPress Dashboard â Rank Math SEO â Sitemap Settings â Posts.
- Disable the Include in Sitemap option for all posts to prevent them from appearing in the sitemap.
- Save Changes.
-
Check Post Terms Exclusion:
- If you have specific post terms (categories or tags) that you want to exclude from the sitemap, you can do so under Exclude Post Terms settings.
-
Validate Your Sitemap:
If after following these steps, the issue persists, please feel free to reply to this ticket, and our support team will assist you further.
Thank you for your understanding and patience as we work to resolve this issue for you.
Sources:
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
Troubleshooting the âCouldnât Fetchâ Error in Google Search Console » Rank Math
Indexed, Not Submitted in Sitemap â Google Search Console » Rank Math
How to Exclude Content From Sitemap » Rank Math
How to Configure Sitemaps in Rank Math – Best Settings and Tips
Hello, thank you for the prompt response, I did the first step, yet no changes. I did the third step and all I could see was
ERRORS: Incorrect http header content-type: “text/html; charset=UTF-8” (expected: “application/xml”)
SITEMAP is VALID: No
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that this issue might have caused.
Please note that posts/pages that are set to noindex are not included in the sitemap. Also if the canonical URL of a page is not self-referencing it is excluded from the sitemap. Finally, news sitemaps only have the URLs of posts published in the last two days as per Google specifications: https://rankmath.com/kb/news-sitemap/
If the above situations are not the case please follow the steps below for initial troubleshooting:
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/
If the issue persists then try disabling the transient cache for the sitemap. This will make sure that your XML sitemap always reflects the latest changes on your site. To do this, you need to add a small piece of code to your siteâs functions.php file or use a plugin like Code Snippets.
The code you need to add is this:
/**
* Filter if XML sitemap transient cache is enabled.
*
* @param boolean $unsigned Enable cache or not, defaults to true
*/
add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');
If youâre not sure how to add this code, you can follow this guide: https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/.
It will show you step-by-step how to use the Code Snippets plugin or edit the functions.php file safely.
After you add the code, please clear any cache on your site or server and check your XML sitemap again. If youâre still facing issues with the sitemap, please let us know â we are happy to investigate further.
Nothing changed. I followed the two steps, nothing changed. I’m giving up.
Hello, I’m still waiting for your response
Hello,
To help you investigate this issue further, we might need to take a closer look at your website and settings. Please follow these steps:
- Edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress admin and FTP logins in the Sensitive Data section. This is a secure section that only our support staff can access.
- Make sure you take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.
- If you prefer, you can use this 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 also use this plugin to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any): https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/
We appreciate your cooperation and patience.
Thank you for choosing Rank Math.
Hello,
I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?
Thank you.
Hello,
Without any action from us, we can see that your main sitemap has 9 sub-sitemaps and 7 of them are post-sitemaps.
(Image in sensitive data section)
The posts sitemaps each contain an average of 200 URLs each and the last contains 49 URLs. This brings the total number of post URLs in the sitemap to 1249 plus the homepage included in the first to 1250.
The other sitemaps; page and category contain collectively 16 URLs. This makes the number of URLs shown in your sitemap 1266.
If you don’t see the same it might be because of a browser cache. Please clear your browser’s cache, use an incognito window or a different browser, and check again.
Let us know how this goes. Also, let us know if you have further questions or concerns.
Thank you.
Thank you very much Mr Ike for checking. I appreciate it. But when I checked Google search console, it only showed 201 discovered pages.
I can’t find the upload function here, I would have shared a screenshot of it here, maybe you can access it here https://imgur.com/a/DNzeGgV
Also, I have 853 pages (according to search console), it has been excluded by ‘noindex’ tag. How do I resolve that too.
Thank you
Hello,
Please ensure your site has good internal linking. Google primarily discovers pages and posts through your internal linking. You can also remove all the previously submitted sitemaps and submit only your main sitemap again to GSC by following this guide: https://rankmath.com/kb/submit-sitemap-to-google/
Also, I have 853 pages (according to search console), it has been excluded by ânoindexâ tag. How do I resolve that too.
Can you share some of the affected URLs and if you can a screenshot of the report from GSC. You can use this tool to share a screenshot with us: https://imgur.com/upload
Hope that helps, and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
I have followed the two steps as suggested,
1. I removed the sitemaps I submitted and resubmitted the main site map ‘sitemap_index.xml’,
2. I also connected Rankmath with my GSC as suggested.
https://imgur.com/a/9pnxpnI (screenshot), 0 pages discovered
I have another website using Rankmath, same setting but all the posts are discovered, so I don’t know what is wrong with the concerned one.
About the Excluded by ânoindexâ tag, I noticed the url links that are under the 850 are my ‘tags’, eg, https://website.ng/tag/piggy-bank, Please what’s the way forward.
Thank you
Hello,
Please note that the zero (0) Discovered URLs that you see in Google Search Console just means that the URLs in the sitemap were already found by Googlebot by other means, instead of via the sitemap. For example, Googlebot may have found the URLs from internal links or possibly from links on another site. It mostly happens when you have good internal linking or use the Instant Indexing plugin.
Hereâs a link you can check for more information:
https://rankmath.com/kb/zero-discovered-urls-through-sitemap/
We can see that your tag page /tag/piggy-bank/ has a meta robot set to index:
[see image2 in Sensitive data section]
Please check the meta-robots of several others and confirm if they are set to index.
We look forward to hearing back from you.
Please share the report from
I am also use Rank math for my websites and they give me good results
If anyone need to check my site I will provide the link of my site.
Hello @WaqasWilan2026,
We appreciate your kind words. If you have any concern or inquiry regarding Rank Math, you can open a new ticket and we will do our best to address your concern.
Thank you for choosing Rank Math, have a wonderful day.
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.
