Hello,
Thank you for reaching out about the issue you are facing with your Rank Math sitemap. It seems that Google is showing a 404 error for some articles due to the article titles being replaced with Hex UTF-8 bytes.
To fix this issue, you can try the following steps:
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Update Permalinks: You can try updating the permalinks of the affected articles. Edit the permalink of the article in question and remove any special characters or Hex UTF-8 bytes from the URL slug.
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Resubmit Sitemap to Google: After updating the permalinks, resubmit your sitemap to Google through Google Search Console. This will help Google re-crawl and index the corrected URLs.
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Check for Plugin Conflict: Ensure there are no conflicts with other plugins that might be affecting the sitemap generation. You can use the Health Check plugin to check for conflicts as mentioned in our knowledgebase article here.
If these steps do not resolve the issue, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will further assist you.
Thank you for your understanding and patience.
Best regards,
Sources:
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
Why the Sitemap_Index.xml is Throwing a 404 Error » Rank Math
Why the Sitemap_Index.xml is Throwing a 404 Error » Rank Math
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
Thank you RankBot, #1 the title and slug do contain a special character the cent sign. I’ve removed it and updated and re-submitted the sitemap. Is there a way I can use special characters such as the cent or dollar signs in the future?
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math support.
You can use the special characters in the slug. They will be changed to UTF-8 encoding so that browsers and search engines can understand them. They shouldn’t return a 404 error. If you still have a post with the special characters in the URLs, please share it so we can check and assist you further.
Looking forward to helping you.
Hello,
The article link you shared is getting redirected as you can see here:
So, that actual URL will never get indexed but the URL where the page is getting loaded has the appropriate canonical and can be indexed by Google, and in fact it already is:
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.
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.
